Holistic Context for a Permaculture Design Business (Part 2 of 2)

This episode is the continuation and completion of the last episode where I started an interactive rolling review of a holistic context for a permaculture design business.

Here we follow through and finish the first pass of Porvenir Design's Holistic Context with owner-directors Scott Gallant and Sam Kenworthy.

To tie in with our current focus, by the way, I have created an online course on Holistic Decision Making starting September 4th, 2020. This course will educate and resource participants to develop their own holistic contexts and start making decisions aligned with that context.

There is also the opportunity to attend a PDC with Porvenir Design in either 2020 or 2021.

If you are interested in this topic you might also want to listen to my introduction to Holistic Decision Making in episode 40 and my recent interview with Allan Savory. You can also catch up on my prior conversation with Scott on the practical and professional realities of a more living design process in episode 41 and episode 42.

Some quotes from this episode

Whether you grow the business or shrink the business, that’s a decision, not a quality of life statement. - Dan

The entire job (of enabling actions) is to make the quality of life statements true. You know, what do we need to be doing or producing to make them true. One point I’ll make is whenever I do this I’ll make it very clear which enabling actions are attached to which quality of life statements. Even though sometimes one enabling action will serve more than one quality of life statement. I find that really helpful particularly later on when you’re auditing and you’re realising, oh right now this quality of life statement is the least true, so what are we going to do about it? That’s our focus for the next six weeks is to make that more true and then move on to the one that now is least true. Let’s go straight to the enabling actions in service of that and find out what’s wrong there, what’s happening there, what we can change. - Dan

When I first got into this I dove really deep into it and really read Savory’s book very closely, workshops and all that. And where I got to with the ‘resource base’ is that he construes it in terms of how things need to be 10, 20, 100, 200 years into the future, socially, on the land. As I tried to work with that, what I found that it directly connected to enabling actions. That’s their job for me. So you’ve got your purpose - where you’re heading, you’ve got the quality of life statements - the core things you need to feel are true along the way if you are getting quality out of being involved and want to stay involved, and then you’ve got the enabling actions - things you need to be doing day by day, week by week, in order to keep those quality of life statements true, which if they’re true, that enables you to actually deliver on your statement of purpose. The future resource base does look into the future, and it’s says, what are the resources that you need to be in place in order to do these enabling actions. What are the enabling actions, what resources are they dependant on, and how do those need to…I think of them as variables. If the key future resource base variable diminishes over time, a classic one in any business is the goodwill of your customers, if that’s going downhill over time at some point you don’t have a business anymore. So it’s one of the core resources you depend on into the future to continue operating. - Dan

This is where we put relationships with suppliers. They are in a certain state. And if the quality of our relationship with the people who supply the timber we make our veg beds out of or even the screws and bolts that we bolt them together with or whatever...