SYNTROPY ACADEMY
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Interview after the Silicon Valley Sustainatopia Conference in 2019
I offer a broad overview of my history leading up to the launch of Syntropy and how we are working to build the scaffolding to enable business to be a cauldron of developmental evolution within and a global force for good in the world. Enjoy!
The Power of Purpose: Corona Virus Fears and Finding the Strength to Navigate a VUCA World
The Power of Purpose
As I sit here writing on Friday the 13th of March, I can’t help but consider the appropriateness of this day of supposed bad luck being the day the White House announces a National Emergency over the Corona virus. I suppose it’s a sad commentary on the human condition to note that it takes a disaster to shake us out of our complacency to sit up and take notice. It not merely management hyperbole to discuss the volatile, uncertain, chaotic and ambiguous (VUCA) world in which we live any longer. To think that a month ago, Italy had a handful of cases of the Corona virus, and now the entire country is quarantined. Stunning…and disturbing.
But this uncertainty only underscores the Power of Purpose. In times of turbulence especially, in life and in business, we need our North Star of purpose to guide us. As I often share with leaders, we all will die with stuff in our inbox left undone. So how do we show up each day, engaged, pointed in the right direction and able to choose wisely where we put our attention. The answer, counter-intuitively perhaps in an increasingly complex world, is to keep it simple. Remember first principles. Realign with our North Star, take stock and then take action. Then “surrender the fruits” of your labor. Wash, rinse and repeat. Much is made in business about its agile ability to “pivot” when necessary. The ability to flex and flow with the changing tides is critical to navigating a volatile world. Yet, it is our deeper purpose which provides the rough guardrails to guide us in the turbulent waters. We aren’t suggesting pure chaos and disorder, but rather a flexibility within the broad confines of the direction provided by your deeper purpose.
Dharma—what we can do, we must do
We come into our lives with certain capacities, proclivities and some would say dormant destinies, written our hearts as our birthright. This birthright, or birth obligation perhaps, in Hindu and Buddhist thought is our Dharma. Dharma has the flavor of our destiny, but is sometimes translated as the “law”.[1] In other words, on the path to authenticity, as we are graced with the capacity to see and feel our true purpose, we have a kind of responsibility to enact it. There is no putting that particular genie back in the bottle, choosing to play small, at least without causing irreparable psychological and spiritual harm. As Jordan Petersen, psychology professor at the University of Toronto in Canada shared in his How to Live a Meaningful Life video on YouTube says responsibility gives life meaning. Taking ultimate responsibility gives ultimate meaning.[2] Once we know what is possible, we recognize the biggest game we can play, we have a kind of cosmic and karmic obligation to accept it. There are no guarantees of success, but take action anyway. Better to be working on solving a challenging problem..better to be engaged in solving a challenging problem, than to be doing nothing at all. There are no guarantees. Do it anyway. Take action anyway. That’s faith. It’s our destiny to find out what’s true. But it’s a false choice really. We’re all all in anyway. It’s ultimately binary. We’re either alive or dead. While alive, the injunction seems to be play the biggest game we can, based on the truth revealed from our highest perspective. Peterson adds that …the answer to the problems of humanity come from the integrity of the individual. Aligning with your own North Star of purpose and taking action accordingly becomes the key action building block of change within society.
It sounds a bit ominous and daunting. And it can be. But the good news is that we are not alone on this journey.
Indra’s Net of Jewels
Buddhist philosophy introduces the concept of all of us connected in a cosmic net. It’s called Indra’s Net of Jewels.[3] So as nodes on Indra’s Net of awakening, shimmering jewels, we are not isolated, independent islands of consciousness. We are woven into the cosmic fabric of the universe, both literally and metaphorically. We covered this in our discussion of Joanna Macy’s despair and empowerment work briefly earlier in this section. As subtle level science matures, we will likely be able to measure that energetically we are actually, radically interconnected. As our identity expands to include all that is, we find ourselves increasingly at home in a loving universe, finding refuge in the cosmic sangha or spiritual brother/sisterhood, pervading space and time. So our identity is bigger than we thought, centered outside ourselves, as is consciousness itself. My consciousness may not exist in my own body, but this body-mind is something of a transducer of consciousness plugging into the larger consciousness of the universe. We might characterize our work in waking up then to refine or clean our transducer, to enable more consciousness to flow through our being. It’s important here to allow the mind to quiet itself naturally—no forcing as that would be like the Zen proverb of trying to wash blood with blood,[4] futilely attempting to clean the screen of our mind which only exacerbates the problem. This is the value of a variety of reflective practices like meditation that create a practice of allowing our awareness to settle back into its original pristine state. As our consciousness clears, our identity expands and our goals shift in kind to a deep desire to care for the whole and serve it.

[1] https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/4967/dharma
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xmr0OrcFCE
[3] https://www.learnreligions.com/indras-jewel-net-449827
[4] http://www.positivehealth.com/review/blood-washing-blood-a-zen-perspective-of-psychotherapy
Purpose to Impact Handshake
I’m often asked about my job title—”Purpose to Impact Advisor.” People ask me, “what does that really mean?” As someone who worked in the developing world for a decade as a social entrepreneur, I was neck-deep in “impact”. I launched a network of eco-friendly taxis in Lima Peru and later launched a renewable energy company delivering energy to communities in 30 countries at the Base of the Economic Pyramid. So my own journey of awakening took me from Silicon Valley “high-tech” to an exploration of we might call “high purpose.” I believed that business, re-engineered for the working poor, was the best tool for poverty alleviation. Want to end poverty? Help poor people earn more money. So if making money was not the primary driver for me, what was it? My deeper purpose was to serve the world. Finding myself in the context of business, my purpose was and is to heal the wound between money and meaning, profit and purpose, to enable business to be a force for good in the world. But how do we actually do that?
Business can be a vehicle for developing yourself and your teams internally as well as for delivering value to the outer world. Change happens from the inside out, from the individual through the collective. At work, we complete the energetic circuit moving from deeper purpose through a developmental culture, guided by authentic leadership to deliver impact to the wider world. To keep leaders who embrace the aspirational idea of purpose and conscious or developmental culture, they need to “walk their talk” by delivering meaningful and positive impact in the world aligned with their purpose. Furthermore, all purpose ultimately resolves to a desire to serve a calling or cause larger than oneself. And the larger the calling, the more people we can attract—employees, customers, suppliers and investors. So if leaders want to tap the infinite wellspring of intrinsic motivation of their teams and win the good opinion of the market at large, I invite them to “play a bigger game and take a longer view.” Purpose and its expression in meaningful impact is the through line running through the hearts of every disaffected worker and the troubled world in which we live. By scaffolding that connection, I think professional catalysts and change makers like Syntropy can help us usher in the more just, humane and sustainable human presence on this earth that we all really want.
Announcing the launch of Syntropy's Corporate Toolkit
We are pleased to announce the launch of Syntropy’s Corporate Toolkit! The 4 tenets of Conscious Capitalism that we help companies catalyze— of deeper purpose, authentic leadership, conscious culture and a stakeholder orientation—which I shorten to “impact”—are inspiring to many, but they can sound like aspirational business philosophy as opposed to actionable practices. With this toolkit, we hope to move from the realm of ideas to answering the question “what do I do first thing Monday morning?” We have curated a list of summarized, simplified and synthesized practices that support the implementation of conscious, or “syntropic” business.
WHO THIS IS FOR:
Syntropy’s toolkit was designed for the time-pressed, seasoned professional who is serious about transforming themselves, their teams and their organizations. While this project was conceived for corporate audiences, it is equally applicable to any context— corporate, domestic nonprofit, government, nongovernmental organization (NGO), or even neighborhood or community groups or others, where conscious people are willing to learn to develop themselves and their collectives to be of service to a call larger than themselves.
THE PROBLEM:
While between $70-$90B1 is spent on corporate training and development every year in the U.S. alone, precious little of that investment translates into real performance change on the job. At most, 10 to 20%2 of training transfers to the job in the form of performance change. That is a $50B/year waste of money, not even factoring in the cost of the unsolved performance problem that persists!
Most training is delivered in dedicated off-site settings. Whether it is a half-day, full-day, or multi-day event, a lot of material is delivered in a short period of time. Didactic instruction, “sage on the stage”, instructor-led training has conventionally been the most common format of training. We’ve inherited it from our school system and the military, where a teacher who has some body of information, would try to impart that knowledge, usually unquestioningly, to their students. With the advent of online platforms, the instructor-led webinar format is the digital equivalent of the traditional classroom experience. The problem is that this method of instruction is not supported as effective by the research. The best instructional design employs interactivity to get the learners to engage with the material in an active way. Adult learners in particular learn most successfully when other factors are woven into the curriculum design.
According to Malcolm Knowles “andragogy”—the study of how adults learn—there are four (4) critical instructional design components to include in effective adult learning environments:
1. consider past learning and life experience;
2. provide practical, applied learning opportunities relevant to the job;
3. create iterative learning, marked by spaced, interval practice;
4. provide opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and reflection
This is a version of learning by doing, recognizing that we learn and retain new information best when we have opportunities to practice and apply the new information in high-fidelity contexts—that is, as close to “on the job” as possible. Ideally this would include actually practicing these new skills on the job, iterating, perhaps with the help of a personal coach, engaging with and learning from other colleagues in a peer-to-peer format, and applying again.
THE SOLUTION: Syntropy Toolkit
Our strategy is to provide a modularized toolkit, where discrete practices can be trained just-in-time (JIT), as needed, assembled and ordered according to the individual needs of each learner, in a cafeteria style and in individualized practice chains. Finding that “simplicity on the other side of complexity” is a challenging balancing act between distilling information to its essential parts—thereby honoring our time-pressed audience— while maintaining high enough fidelity to still be effective. The team at Syntropy is deeply familiar with each of these practices, having learned them and then applied them internally and with a range of clients. Said simply, if engaged sincerely, they work! Check out the toolkit here!