Imagining the Ideal World - Economics and Ecology: United for a Sustainable World - page 138

We Can Only Move toward a Positive
Every enterprise needs to have the organizing context of a vision toward
which to strive, be it an entrepreneur building a business of ecotourism or a
community planning for its future. This need is particularly true of a com-
munity, which must create and work within a shared framework—the triple
bottom-line. As a strong organizing context, a shared vision has some dis-
tinctive traits:
• It tends to focus a wide range of human concerns.
• It is strongly centered in the community.
• It can use alternative scenarios to explore possible futures by depict-
ing in words and images that which a community is striving to
become.
• Its creation relies on the trust, respect, and inclusivity of interper-
sonal relationships.
• It is ideally suited to, and depends on, public involvement.
• It is ideally suited to the use of creative, graphic imagery.
Although a shared vision does not replace other kinds of planning, it is the
organizational context within which all planning fits (ecological integrity,
social equity, and economic stability), a positive context that is all too often for-
gotten. Thus, the greatest single agent of failure to achieve one's desires, what-
ever they are, is not understanding the importance of a vision, how to create
one, or a commitment to its implementation. This observation is especially true
of communities and their commitment to the triple bottom-line of sustainability.
There is great power in learning to reframe negatives into positives. In
doing so, the participants in creating a shared vision not only understand
their community from several vantage points but also understand that much
of the confusion in communication comes from trying to move away from
negatives. Trying to move away from a negative precludes people from say-
ing what they really mean because they are focused on what they do not want .
As long as people express what they do not want, it is virtually impossible to
figure out what they do want .
Although our educational systems in the United States, beginning with
parents and ending with universities, stress the positive, they usually teach in
terms of the negative. What does this statement mean? What might it cause?
Suppose your neighbor lives along a busy street and has a little boy named
Jimmy. Your neighbor is concerned about Jimmy because of the increasing
automobile traffic in the neighborhood.
One day Jimmy's mother says to him: “Jimmy, don't go into the street.” The
directive words (those telling Jimmy what to do) are don't go (a confusing