My journey started when I was born, of course. As did all of ours. My journey with purpose however, which is an entirely different thing as you know, started quite a bit later in life. Looking back on it now I can see the pieces falling together to arrive at this place. The journey began, as all good journeys do, with a question. And just like that my journey turned into a quest, funny how that works.
You see, I didn't know what my quest should be. Little did I know that just asking the question: What is my quest? is enough to start you on your quest. I felt destined for greatness as I'm sure all young people do before life smacks them upside the head, but I lacked direction. With this indecision in mind I started working with my dad. Part of me felt an obligation towards doing so, but I did it nonetheless and it's part of me. The work with my dad taught me a lot of things. You see, my dad was an entrepreneur. He was on his quest. All of the businesses that my dad started and sold were in the secondary market. That is, he took what was normally waste and turned it back into value. Medical Device Reprocessing was cutting edge. There were no regulations for it at the time until the FDA folded it into the manufacturing section. We sold that business to an international manufacturer as they brought that process under their own umbrella.
From there we went into the construction materials business. We developed a new building material that decreased energy use in homes dramatically. This was hard work. After the cushy office job in a clean lab environment I was thrust into a dirty manufacturing job. I preferred the installation and sales side of the job. At least that was out in the sunshine with the breeze at my back.
You know they say sometimes greatness is thrust upon you. Well, this wasn't greatness. Something was about to be thrust upon me; it was tragedy.
The death of my father at that time of my life hit me hard. I tried not to let it. In fact, I kind of just pushed it down and away and focused on the task at hand. I was putting a roof over my families head, that was my only task at the moment. But, it eventually caught up with me. After the necessities were met, it crept back into my life. It’s funny how major life events can send you into a tailspin, don’t you think? Not funny in the “ha ha” way. Funny in the “Oh man, that really sucks” sort of way. I was in danger. The danger to me at the time was internal. I had succumbed to a malaise. I stopped reading for pleasure or learning. I went into a stall pattern. I hadn't really dealt with his death ever, and it took a few years to catch up to me. It didn't really catch up, it snuck up. The cool thing is, tho, is that as sneakily as the malaise caught me the cure for that malaise snuck in as well.
I've always been a hippie. Well, that's not quite right. Pseudo-hippie. I love the outdoors, I worked for a wilderness therapy program for a few years. I’ve hiked miles and miles through desert wilderness. I want to see it taken care of. That's my hippie side. My non-hippie self is a fan of economics, business transactions, and emerging technology. It's a jumbled mess inside my head, what can I say? Anyway, it's the hippie side that lead to the cure for my malaise. You see, I started researching permaculture.
Say what you will about some of the aspects of permaculture, but as a design science for land usage it’s pretty damn good. I was really drawn to the concept of not fighting against the natural forces that occur over your land, but rather to use them. For instance, if you consistently get strong winds that come on your property don't build a wall, build a windmill. I'm oversimplifying it of course, but the release of the fight against forces you can't control saved me from myself. I took a permaculture design course and loved it, but...I needed something more. You see, I didn't have land. I wasn’t a farmer. I was working as an industrial wastewater operator at the time, and permaculture didn't easily convert to my working experience. Luckily for me, Holistic Management is well known in permaculture circles. It was only a matter of time before I found it.
I must admit something, I had to read Holistic Management three times before I felt like I even got the basics of it. Holistic Management is an immense work with insights at every turn. It talked about managing the land from the perspective of someone who has done it for years to someone that has done it for years. I've been in the environmental field for years, but I hadn’t been on the agricultural side of land management. It took some further research and exposure to get thru some of the basic concepts in Holistic Management. I got obsessed with it. I read and re-read sections constantly. It's a good thing it was on kindle because the pages of a physical book would not have been able to withstand this use, something would have ripped. The problem wasn't with the book however. The problem was with me. I was coming at Holistic Management from a land management perspective. I should have been coming at it from a pure management perspective. Let me explain.
As a land management framework, Holistic Management is quite successful. It takes an environment that is incredibly complex and chaotic with interactions that happen independent of, unknown to, and immutable to the manager, and developed a framework to navigate this environment. Holistic Management is a framework that helps to not just survive, but thrive in this environment. My study of Holistic Management, and my friction with it, was attempting to force this framework into a very specific domain: land management. But, aren't other domains also complex? Don't other domains also have interactions that are independent of and unknown to the manager? Once again, I had to let go of the fight to be able to apply something to a larger context.
Once again, I had to let go of the fight to be able to apply something to a larger context.
I knew Holistic Management could be adapted to multiple domains or at least I knew that the principles could be, the problem was that it wasn't easy. At least, it wasn't easy to do and still keep the same framework. You would have to cut out a fundamental part of the original framework if you were to apply it toward non-land management applications. It was certainly difficult without some serious mental acrobatics. I started that way at first, tho. I adapted the ecological systems as metaphors for other useful systems that were applicable not only in my professional career, but as a personal resource management tool as well.
Once I started adapting it to my own personal experience I started to see what the universal principles were. It was staring me in the face from the beginning. Holistic Management as it now exists...is incomplete.
By focusing on the land management segment, a strategy that I wholeheartedly agree with by the way, Holistic Management actually excludes the rest of us from the benefits of a principled context based management system.
A lot of us could benefit from better management in complexity.
A lot of us could benefit from a regenerative management system.
A lot of us want to manage our businesses, careers, and lives in a regenerative manner.
It was the realization that I wasn't alone in wanting these things, that inspired me to create Regenerative Resource Management. Perhaps it's my disdain for the academic world, but something in me refused to make something and then try and convince others that it's good without first testing it in the real world. This needed to be a system born of practice not theory. I needed to put it to the test thru resource management in an industrial context, my familial context, and personally.
I wanted a system that could be universally adopted. Something where the underlying structure of the process stayed the same, but the manner in which you develop the system changes. The system itself would adapt to your context. Regenerative Resource Management isn’t really a management system so much as it’s an instruction booklet on how to develop one on your own.
You see, that’s the kicker. My context is not the same as your context, nor will it ever be that way, so any management system has to be unique to your context. The underlying structure however, can be based on sound management principles which means they can have a common structure. Have you noticed that all of the controversy surrounding Holistic Management has been directed at the use of livestock and not the management principles? The principles are sound they just needed to be made universal.
Having fully immersed myself in the permaculture/Holistic Management world so intensely, I broke away. If I was going to develop a system that was inspired by Holistic Management but adapted and changed to reflect sound principles I would need some distance from the source of that inspiration while I worked out the kinks. I also needed to get to the bottom of human experience if I was going to find universal principles. I paused my study of Holistic Management, but I didn’t stop my research. That's crazy. No, I just pivoted.
This pivot led me to thinkers and writers such as Daniel Kanneman, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, cognitive scientists such as Carmon Simon, as well as social scientists like Robert Cialdini. What I wanted from this line of study was a greater understanding into the workings of the modern human. What I found was disconcerting, and just a little bit surprising.
I had always considered myself to be a fairly rational human being. I'm even keeled in my emotions, and don't really lose control all that often. After jumping down the rabbit hole that is the science of cognition I discovered that my perspective on things might not be correct. And not just for me. I wasn't singled out as the irrational monster in a sea of rationality. No. All humans have irrationalities. You see, we are still operating with caveman hardware. This is not to say that we aren't also rational at times. It's just that the proportion of rationality to irrationality is flipped from what you might think. You, like me, probably think that you are rational 90% of the time and irrational 10% of the time. The troubling truth is that those ratios are backwards. We don't like that situation so we do what is called "Post decision rationalization" to maintain the illusion that we make our decisions rationally.
You see, rationality uses a huge amount of energy. Massive amounts of calories are burned when we think rationally. Here’s the rub, our entire evolutionary goal requires us to preserve energy. Not only that, it's the slower thinking process. We wouldn’t have gotten very far in our prehistoric past if we only thought rationally. It makes sense, but that doesn't mean I like it.
This was a huge ego blow for me. Damn. To be honest, it hit me so hard that I delayed the development of this project. I must have superhero powers of stubbornness because I keep coming back to these hits that make me pause. To get beyond this block I went back to my old stand-by tactic: I let go. I stopped fighting. I started working. I had an epiphany during the writing process. That epiphany encouraged me to develop this system. If we only have small times of rationality followed by a longer periods of post decision rationalization then we need to come up with a system that harnesses that rationality while constraining the non-rational side. This makes the framework of the process so important. We develop our frameworks using our rational mind and create tools and tricks that influence our irrational selves to stay on the path.
Enter the heuristics. Like sword and shield to a knight. Developing “rules of thumb” to guide that irrational side toward the Future Context doesn't feel confining. Often in other frameworks everything feels like a cage. The process becomes this endless maze to come up with some right answer to the simple things in life. The process makes the decisions, not you. It’s unpleasant and life is too short for that kind of thing. You aren't allowed to express the thing that makes you unique.
The framework shouldn’t become a cave that doesn't allow you to go on. Here you are looking for the dragon and someone sold you on a map. Use this map they said. That's the way I went and if you follow my exact path you'll find the dragon unawares. The problem with this of course is that it's completely false. The dragon he had slain is not the same dragon that you are after. The cave he explored crumbled and collapsed behind him leaving only false starts and dead ends for you.You cannot follow previous maps. That territory doesn't exist anymore. What you can do is train for the unexpected.
When you take up this quest, as you have done by finding this website, you begin by training your mind for the journey. This path starts at your doorstep in the Current context and traverses the world in search of adventure. You cannot follow others paths so you develop your own with the Future Context Statement.The dangers you face along the path are unpredictable. I can't tell you that you will face this kind of dragon, or that kind of minion, because I don't know. Neither do you. You have to be prepared for anything. These dangers are quick tho. That's the problem. They come at you and attempt to distract and damage you. They come out of the shadows. They leap from behind boulders. And they morph from friends into enemies.
Heuristics then become your shield. Your swords. Your horse. The heuristics allow you to make those snap decisions, but to make them in such a way as to continue on your quest. The most insidious way that these dangers influence you is to disorient and distract you. They don't want you to continue. They don't want you to find the dragon. They don’t want you to create your Future Context. If they can turn you around then you'll hike along going the wrong direction. They don't even have to fight you at that point. You do it to yourself. Heuristics and Guidelines keep this from happening.
You can't develop them at the time of attack tho. That's too late. You need to think about them before you start your journey. You need to hone them with each attack. You need to share them around the campfire so your compatriots can learn from them and teach you their own. These are important skills that allow you navigate the path. The path that you are forging. The path that leads to your dragon and your gold. The path that lead you to your Future Context.
The question that you must now ask yourself: Are you ready to articulate your Future Context going forth to confront chaos and manage your resources in complexity? Download Regenerative Resource Management. A Primer. Get started today.