Creating Sustainable Organizations

By Chuck McVinney
©2001 McVinney & Company

Introduction
1. The Idea
2. Why care?
3. The Challenge Ahead
4. The First Principle: Stewardship
5. The Second Principle: Creativity
6. The Third Principle: Community
7. Some Common Sense Guidelines
8. Summary

5. The Second Principle of Sustainability

Second, sustainability means co-creation. Co-creation is creating together. It is collaboration to invent the future. Creativity as the same dictionary says, is:

Creativity:

Having the ability or power to create things (create = bring into existence), characterized by originality and expressiveness.

Co-creation is the extension of empowerment to active participation in creating the future. It means engaging in the conscious evolution of organizations, their work, and their means of doing the work. Co-creation makes us partners in sustaining life on earth and in enhancing the quality of life now and for generations to come. It means that how we act today affects, as the Native Americans said, the 7th generation. Co-creation makes us co-partners in what the future of work, life, and what the quality of both will be in the present and the future. The key behavior supporting co-creation is enlightened collaboration. Enlightened collaboration is more that just working for an effective solution; it is putting aside the usual agendas of personal gain and glory for the well-being of everyone who is touched by a decision. Enlightened collaboration is not a new religious cult anymore than it is a utopian fantasy or an oxymoron - it is the new survival skill. >>