Buildings and the appliances within them account for 40 percent of America's energy use and a third of our global warming emissions. A home energy audit is often the first step in making a home more efficient. But getting an audit done properly is not necessarily an easy process.

The result of all audits should include a list of specific recommended improvements and a payback analysis. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a mid-size city, our energy provider offers a low-cost inspection of the thermal shell of a home but not a comprehensive energy audit that would include a Home Energy Efficiency Rating (HERS) with a blower door test (a diagnostic test designed accurately measure the air tightness of a home and locate sources of air leakage) and thermal imaging analysis. For this, we are on our own to look elsewhere.

Finding a qualified and ethical auditor is not a straightforward process. With the growth of the green building market, it is surprising that there is neither a national standard for an energy audit nor a nationally recognized certification for energy auditors. These gaps put customers at a disadvantage. There are many instances of companies that use the energy audit merely as an entry point in order to sell other products or services. A true energy audit should stand on its own and advocate for the homeowner's best interests.

A mishmash of entities certify energy auditors (but it’s unclear if standards are the same among them) and building performance ratings (a different and more comprehensive process). For example, the Energy Star website has a link to locate an “Energy Star for homes partner” which leads to a new homes partner locator tool for either builders, performance raters or lenders. Not much help for an old-house owner.

Doing a local search turned up a list that was hard to navigate - many providers cited years of experience as inspectors or builders, but that told me little about their training or qualifications to assess and recommend appropriate fixes to my old house. A significant problem is finding someone who will not recommend replacement products over fixes that are more appropriate. I experienced this with a very capable carpenter we hired to fix the framework around a bank of windows. He insisted that replacing the 14 windows in the entire room, which would take him a day, was a much better value for me than his spending 2.5 days in repairs. While I believe he sincerely felt that new windows were a superior product, it seemed apparent to me that his cut on the sale of the new product had to be better than the 12 extra hours of work involved in repairs. The potential benefits of reusing and improving, rather than replacing, facilities are covered in a report on building reuse I released.

Speaking of windows, extensive studies by the National Parks Service indicate that changes to windows should be based on factors other than energy savings; they estimate the "payback" for window replacement is in the range of 90 years. The studies affirm that the most cost effective and practical improvements are often the least expensive: adding insulation and air sealing. This adds another level of difficulty to the energy retrofit - finding qualified insulation and HVAC installers. Many are not knowledgeable about effectively and safely insulating buildings or increasing heating equipment performance efficiency, primarily because until very recently, there was little training available. If we are serious about scaling up energy efficiency retrofits, building owners need a better way to assess the qualifications of both inspectors and installers. An oversight body for a national certification would be a good step forward. But it should build into its specifications the vast amount of data showing the benefits of maximizing the use of existing materials, for example fixing and reusing windows and other parts of older homes. Reuse also avoids the negative impacts of sending usable materials to the landfill, as well as the energy and emissions costs in producing the new products.

After eight years of making education systems use a one-size-fits-all, simplistically linear model for judging a school's performance, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the federal government is searching for a new form of accountability. The Obama administration recently said it wants to ditch the AYP provision in the No Child Left Behind law, which judges annually whether a school is succeeding or failing based mostly on achieving pre-set targets for student test scores. AYP has been the target of endless complaint and opposition. According to a New York Times report, the administration concluded the AYP system "fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students. Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools."

That's good, because AYP was grossly inadequate. But solving the problems of performance accountability in education won't be easy. Imagine that you are a charter school authorizer with a portfolio of, say, 50 schools, or the superintendent of a school district with a similar number of schools.

• To what performance standards should you hold schools accountable?
• Should all schools be held to the same standards?
• What should happen when a school fails to meet the standards?
• And since even a failing school has some students, teachers, classes that are meeting the standards--"islands of success"--what should happen to them?

Let's tackle just the first two of these questions to get a sense of the complexities involved in designing a new performance measurement system for education.

Which performance standards? States are beginning to converge on a set of college- and career-readiness standards that mostly will involve test scores, perhaps on the ACT sequence of three aligned tests beginning in 8th grade. So let's use those. With trepidation--since right now perhaps only a third of high school graduates actually achieve those standards.

Add other standards if you agree with people who argue that test scores in subject matters simply doesn't measure enough of a student's college readiness. Add even more if you think (I do) that rates of high school graduation, enrollment in post-secondary programs, and college completion also are part of a school's performance picture.  

What about elementary and middle schools--how will you measure their performance? If a middle school is supposed to prepare students for success in high school, how is  high school readiness measured? If an elementary school is part of a three-school feeder system, can it be held accountable for whether its students do or don't go to college seven years after they leave fifth grade?

Finally, recall that schools increasingly exist in a competitive "market" environment. Unsatisfied parents can move their kids to other schools--or home school with a link for a cyber school--at the drop of a textbook. So it seems important to measure parent and student satisfaction with the school--and this won't necessarily hinge on the school's academic performance. Parents and students care about many other characteristics of a school.

Universal or variable standards? Should an urban school system with 70% of its minority, immigrant students living in low-income households be held to the same performance standards as a suburban school system with 90% white students living in middle- and upper-middle class households? Consider the track records of these two schools. The city schools graduate 40-50% of their students, maybe 10% are college ready, and maybe 20-25% enroll in post-secondary programs. The suburban schools graduate 80-90%, 30-40% are college ready, and 60-70% enroll in post-secondary programs.

With this starting point for measuring performance, should we say that a 90% graduation rate is the standard for both systems? If not, what is the lower standard for the low-income school? And what's the explanation--e.g., "poor kids can't learn"--for holding a lower standard?

But if all schools have the same performance standards it seems obvious that even if the low-performing school improves its performance substantially, it will take a number of years to achieve the same performance that the suburban school already achieves. How many years should it take? How can you tell if it is making enough progress fast enough? How can you even tell if the school has a good plan and enough capability to make progress?

We've spent much of the last few years working with foundations--and whining about them (with our partners and with many of the people we know who work in foundations). From time to time we have reflected on what it is about the foundations that often makes them frustrating to engage. Our conclusion is that usually it's not a particular individual or an irrational process; it's a particular type of modern organizational culture. And, we've learned from philosopher Ken Wilber, the culture reflects a certain level of consciousness (the "Green/Consensus" level) that impedes strategic decision making. We thought our friends in Foundationland might be interested in this analysis of the "power and pathology" of foundation culture.

The Meeting

Let's plunge right in. Wilber describes a meeting run on green-consciousness principles. See if it sounds like an experience you've had with foundations: 

• Everybody is allowed to express his or her feelings, which often takes hours.
• There is an almost interminable processing of opinions, often reaching no decision or course of action, since a specific course of action would likely exclude somebody.
• Thus there are often calls for an inclusionary, nonmarginalizing, compassionate embrace of all views, but exactly how to do this is rarely spelled out, since in reality not all views are of equal merit.
• The meeting is considered a success, not if a conclusion is reached, but if everybody has a chance to share their feelings.
• Since no view is supposed to be inherently better than another, no real course of action can be recommended, other than sharing all views.
• If any statements are made with certainty, it is how oppressive and nasty all the alternative conceptions are. (This is why one of pluralism's main activities is not advancing its own constructive conceptions, but criticizing and deconstructing everybody else's.)”

Seems familiar? What drives the meeting behaviors is "Green/Consensus consciousness"--a way of being that is one of more than a dozen "levels" of consciousness through which people and societies evolve. (For more on the levels, click here.) 

Green Consciousness

Green/Consensus culture, says Wilber, is "aware of the many different contexts and numerous different types of truth (pluralism)." Thus, "it bends over backwards in an attempt to let each truth have its own say, without marginalizing or belittling any. As with the catch words 'anti-hierarchy,' 'pluralistic,' and 'egalitarian,' whenever you hear the word 'marginalization' and a criticism of it, you are almost always in the presence of a green [worldview]."

The power of the Green/Consensus worldview is that it represents a significant evolution in human consciousness – as Wilber notes:

“It has acted with sensitivity and care in attempting to redress social imbalances and avoid exclusionary practices. It has been responsible for basic initiatives in civil rights and environmental protection. It has developed strong and often convincing critiques of the philosophies, metaphysics, and social practices of the conventional religious (blue) and scientific (orange) memes, with their often exclusionary, patriarchal, sexist, and colonialistic agendas.”

The culture of many large, professional foundations is deeply grounded in the “Green/Consensus” worldview (not to be confused with traditional environmental “greens,” who are, however, also part of this world view). Green is the dominant worldview of most charitable, philanthropic and non-profit organizations.  And it is the core of traditional “liberal” political ideology.

The dark side of the Green world view (and the source of much of its pathology in foundation culture) is this: Many participants in this worldview have engaged in a vicious “transcend and dissociate” strategy and seek to deny the validity of any other world view (and their associated competencies) and end up in a self-destructive and unproductive “group grope” approach that finds it difficult to actually do anything useful. This works against being strategic or innovative, which requires making choices, ruling out certain options, on the basis of analysis.

The Problem With Being Green

Recognizing this underlying worldview--both its power and potential pathology--helps us to understand both “why thing are the way they are” and what one might do about it. A dyed-in-the-wool Green/Consensus culture leads to a predictable set of behaviors.  We have seen these in many different organizations of all types.  They include:

• A focus on feelings, inclusion, participation, representation and “voices.”
• An aversion to making qualitative judgments (unless they are linked to judgments about the bad qualities of repression/exclusion and the good qualities of inclusion/empowerment).
• An aversion to serious strategy and intellectual discipline (the “inclusion ethic” extends to strategic options, not just people; statements of strategy are usually so broad they can encompass virtually anything rather that express choices made).
• A preference for talking and engaging over doing.
• An avoidance of tools for measurement and performance.
• An aversion to many kinds of hierarchies (both good and bad)
• A valuing of intentions over results

Another problem with the Green/Consensus world view is that it dismisses the strengths of the Orange/Strategic worldview (the dominant capitalist business worldview) as well as the Blue/Authority worldview (the dominant conservative culture worldview). 

What This Means in Practice

Using this consciousness framework to assess one foundation's strategies, we provided a top executive with this analysis of the strategic weaknesses caused by the foundation's Green/Consensus point of view:

Several consistent characteristics of your strategy materials reflect what we would call the “green pathology syndrome.” 

• Strategy becomes so broad that it verges on being meaningless.  Good strategy is also clear about what you won’t do, and allows you to make choices about what is in/out of your “target zone.” 
• There is an effusive “aspirational” tone to much of the material that makes one inherently distrust its seriousness and objectivity.  This, of course, reflects the beauty of the moral aspirations of the Green worldview: social justice, equity, de-marginalization, inclusiveness, access, diversity, participation, capacity building, opportunity. The problem is that this eloquent discourse on bad things that have happened (and the alternative good outcomes that should happen) somehow obviates the need to have serious, detailed, complex and disciplined strategies to move from one to the other.
• There is a tendency to value relationships over results. Listing who is engaged, connected, linked, enthusiastic, etc. takes precedence over describing what was actually done, how it worked and what the results were.
• There is a tendency to mistake root cause analysis for solution analysis.  For instance, much of the analysis of structural exclusion uses words that refer to “a lack of access.” The strategy is then posited as “increasing/securing/creating access.”  The difficulty is that there is no real hypothesis about how this might happen – i.e. what the innovations are that can reverse the structural forces that create exclusion in the first place.

Why These Green Tendencies Matter

For foundations to gain more impact, they must develop strategies for systemic change and for scaling up. The process of large-scale systems change requires several steps:

1. Understanding the system and its dynamics
2. Identifying leverage points for change
3. Creating hypotheses for how you might “move” a leverage point
4. Developing the competencies required to move the leverage point
5. Trying out repeated experiments
6. Developing scaling strategies

This process requires serious analysis, differentiation, measurement, clarity about what impacts are sought, and more--all of which are anathema to Green/Consensus consciousness.

Transcending Green Culture

The solution to this problem is what Wilber refers to as “transcending and including”--meaning embracing the positive side of the Green worldview, while also not disassociating from the powers of the Strategic and Authority worldviews, and ultimately transcending Green consciousness to move to the next level (what he call an “Integral” worldview).

In practical terms, this means making sure there are people in the organization who embody these other approaches and bring their skills to the table. You can do this in several ways:

• Deliberately bring people who reflect these other skill sets into the organization.
• Make these other competencies core parts of your organization.
• Continuously push the organization's culture to transcend its limitations.

Evolution of Consciousness/World Views

Wilber’s approach is based on the work of Claire Graves and Don Beck, who wrote the book Spiral Dynamics.  (They worked with Nelson Mandela in the design of the post-apartheid governance design.) The basic idea is that the evolution of human consciousness proceeds in waves of development:

• The waves represent fluid, living systems rather than rigid, hierarchical steps.
• Each subsequent wave is more inclusive of other consciousness than the previous ones, and capable of responding to higher levels of complexity.
• Each prior wave is a fundamental ingredient of all subsequent waves, and thus each is to be cherished and embraced (“transcend and include”).
• We all have all these waves of consciousness in us. Each expresses a unique dimension of human need. Healthy individuals and societies satisfy the drives of all waves.
• The imperative is to care for the health of the entire spiral of waves – and honor the unique contribution of each wave.
• Each new wave/world view tends to discount the ones before it (“transcend and dissociate”), and deny the ones that emerge, believing it is the only “true” world view.
• Social systems must match the developmental level of the population to be successful.

Our colleague Richard Anderson attended the recent U.S. Soldier Technology Conference, along with the entire military industrial complex. The Marine commander responsible for rapid acquisition of critical technologies said the Marines most need a low-cost, distributive alternative energy technology to deploy in forward command locations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The conference was about networking the soldier, deploying sensors, integrating GPS, video, and other data and human factor sensor technology for 'front of the spear' soldier deployment," Richard reported. "But the commander stands up and says alternative energy is at the top of his list!" The demand is driven by cost: One gallon of fuel delivered to a base costs the government $400. Here may be an opportunity for solar and wind energy innovators (but, as far as Richard could tell, not a single alternative energy company was in the room).

The military is under other pressures to innovate for sustainability. It is expected to "green" its bases--small communities, really, which contain hundreds of thousands of families and have all the sustainability challenges of non-military communities. Here, too, the military has an opportunity to be an innovation leader, whether by acting on their own or in partnership with adjacent communities also tackling climate change mitigation and adaptation as well as other greening strategies.

Supporting innovations in alternative energy and in community sustainability: not areas in which you'd imagine the military would be showing leadership. If it does, think of it as "nation building" right here at home.

Back in the 1980s I arranged for a delegation of Michigan state government officials and business leaders to travel to Sweden and Germany to check out the workforce development systems. Meanwhile, economic development staffers traveled to northern Italy to learn about the entrepreneurial manufacturing system that had grown up. So I'm a believer in "seeing it to understand it and be inspired by it."

Nowadays I am often asked where to go to see "the best" in urban sustainability and education reform, two of the social innovation niches that our Innovation Network for Communities focuses on. The question is not about seeing an interesting program or project; those are a dime a dozen. It's about seeing an entire system--an ensemble of innovations--at work at large scale and with big impact, and that's much more rare.

I'm not sure there really is a community yet where you can see the future of public education; too much of the change that's occurring is still in an early stage and hasn't evolved to the system level (or been all that successful).

For urban sustainability the go-to place is Denmark. NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman seems to have moved there, so he can write article after article about how that tiny nation established public policies and entrepreneurial businesses the U.S. should emulate. Recently Hugh McDiarmid Jr, the communications director of the Michigan Environmental Council, visited Denmark for four days as part of a Michigan delegation, and came back with a glowing review. (Michigan Environmental Report, Fall 2009, www.environmentalcouncil.org)

Denmark is charging full-speed ahead with a formidable array of government-backed technology innovations that have buoyed its economy, galvanized its citizens and made it a key exporter of renewable power ideas and hardware... Danish citizens grumble frequently about high taxes, but they also see the benefits of their collective investments every day--in strong and safe public transit systems, tremendous export markets, nearly full employment and a standard of living that ranks near the top of European nations.

• Denmark uses renewable energy to power 30% of its electricity needs and recycles 65% of its waste. It expects by 2020 to generate 50% of electricity from wind turbines.
• It accounts for about 1% of the world's exports--14 times higher than its share of the world's population. Much of the export business is in energy innovations. Denmark builds 95% of the world's off-shore wind turbines. Some 22,000 Danes work in wind-energy industries.
• It has launched ProjectZero to make the city of Sonderborg the first large sustainable and CO2 neutral area in Europe by 2029.

But any visit to the future, however impressive it might be, bumps into the question of transferability to a different context: Can we do this back home? The Danish people pay much more for their energy than Americans (or anyone else), e.g., $7.35 for a gallon of gas. Their government is deeply involved in the energy sector--picking winning and losing technologies, making huge investments in R&D; strongly influencing energy prices; providing tx incentives; and so on. Armed with this information, one member of the Michigan delegation asked, "Is this system acceptable to the American people?"

A few months ago a group from Michigan visited the Harlem Children's Zone in New York City, which has gained national attention for assembling innovations aimed at greatly increasing the chances of thousands of low-income minority children in a large urban district to become college students. They raised similar questions about transferability, since the model has depended on a very charismatic leader and tens of millions of dollars from donors.

The future is out there, but you still have to figure out how to "import" it--the ideas/actions you see--into the realities of your own place. 

Michigan's state government recently approved an expansion of the number of charter schools in the state but only as long as they are high-performing schools. It was part of a political compromise needed so the state could qualify for federal education-innovation grants.  But it was a quite different move from the usual charter movement calls for more charter schools. It was also a smart move on the part of the state's charter school players, who already have a larger "market penetration" than almost any other state. Here's a brief explanation of why the turn to a focus on quality matters:

Since the early 1990s, the strategy of creating charter schools to boost education system performance has evolved from a movement for public policy change and innovation into a large-scale field of practice involving thousands of organizations and millions of people. Still, the charter field is at an early stage of development: highly decentralized; pursuing many models and practices; without defining standards or norms. Meanwhile, policymakers, the media, and many charter proponents focus attention more on successful individual charter schools or the innovative operators of charter chains and less on the charter field’s collective strategic challenges and opportunities. During the past two decades, state laws, regulations, and financing for charters, as well as federal government supports, have become more established nationwide and the charter systems that emerged—authorizers, governing entities, and operators—have demonstrated their operational viability at substantial scale. Although charters have captured only a small share of the education market, these developments put the charter field on nearly equal footing with the traditional education system when many policymakers and parents of students consider their options.

Now the charter field faces a new and crucial strategic challenge: thanks to its successful evolution, the field must raise its level of performance—student and school achievement—to meet higher expectations and succeed in a highly competitive market. The field must rapidly generate many more high-performing schools.

Charter-school authorizers are uniquely positioned to take on this challenge, because they are situated between state policymakers and charter-school practitioners—so they engage with and link both policy and practice—and many operate at fairly large scale and have built management systems accordingly. However, authorizers have focused mainly on increasing the number of charters schools and ensuring their compliance with contracts and regulations. They have paid much less attention to improving the performance of schools and developing high-quality innovations. And authorizers have tended to work as “go-it-alone” entities rather than aggregating their resources to increase their leverage and impact on both policy and practice.

When Barack Obama officially became president one year ago today, we at nuPOLIS inaugurated him as America's First Transnational President. We argued that his global roots and ideals exemplify a new type of American experience and identity. We speculated that "the nation’s changing demographics and culture, and perhaps its changing politics—as well as the unprecedented blood lines and experiences of its new president—suggested that an American experience and identity were emerging that included, but also transcended, what being an 'American' has meant."

A year later, we stand by our story. The evolution of a transnational American identity is a slow-motion affair along a ragged edge of change.

• Obama's visible appreciation of other cultures--contemporary Native American pottery now in the Oval Office--his embrace of multilateralism, and appointment of an Hispanic Supreme Court judge model a version of transnationalism that makes sense to many Americans. But for others it's just a part of an East Coast-European-elitist framework that is wrong headed.  
• Obama's administration backed off on pushing for immigration reform in its first year, and the prospects are unclear for changes that will affect the standing of millions of non-Americans living and working in America.
• The manager of Where the Buffalo Roam, a souvenir shop in Obama's Chicago, reported that fascination with Obama has declined. He's marked down $20 Obama T-shirts to $5 and says that European visitors, not Americans, are buying them.

Perhaps, though, the Obama effect is less important than the seemingly inexorable demographic dynamics that are underway in the US. The Great Recession has slowed down immigration worldwide and led to anti-immigrant tension, but in recent weeks demographers reaffirmed estimates that by 2050 a majority of the US population will be non-Caucasian. And Latino immigration trends have turned the American South into the first region in which a majority of children are both minority and low income.

Transnationalism isn't just a matter of immigration; as Alvaro Lima explained in a comprehensive report, it's a social, economic, cultural, and political phenomenon driven by the behavior of tens of millions of people. National symbols like the election of Obama matter. National policies matter--some are transnational-friendly, others are unfriendly. But even if politics lag behind the curve of change, the shifts in who is an American suggest corresponding shifts in what an American is.

The jury is out on just how Web 2.0 technologies will enhance the development of networks for social impact. Will they be tools that increase the effectiveness and efficiency of networks? Will they be disruptive capacities—greatly broadening effective participation in, for instance, public policy making and communities of practice or ushering in an era of widespread “bottom up” user-generated, rather than “top down” filtered, information?

Our own initial but brief exploration of this topic—monitoring some of the literature; interviewing network practitioners immersed in Web 2.0; listening to the questions/experiences of networks we advise or manage—has led us to this conclusion: Although most people are asking what the Web 2.0 technologies do, the critical question is how the technologies meet—or don’t—a network’s strategic needs. The answer depends, of course, on understanding what the technologies do, but is also depends on understanding the strategic needs of networks seeking social impact.

So our contribution for now is more questions:

1. What are the hypotheses about the differences Web 2.0 can make for achieving a network’s goals—learning goals, policy advocacy goals, innovation goals, branding goals, and others?
2. What are the hypotheses about the differences Web 2.0 can make for improving the functionality of a network—its members’ connectivity, alignment, or collaborations for production—and for helping a network evolve?
3. What are the hypotheses about the differences Web 2.0 can make for networks that are building movements, or mobilizing campaigns, or developing fields—three very different sorts of activities some networks undertake?
4. What patterns can Web 2.0 usage reveal that provide strategic information/insight for a network?
5. How can a network measure and differentiate qualitative vs. quantitative effects of Web 2.0 technologies, and their value for a network?

• Many Web 2.0 technologies generate a large number of connections, helping, almost effortlessly, to expand a network’s membership and potential reach. This may be of great value to some networks, but many networks depend more on the quality than the quantity of their connections, because they seek to build trust and reciprocity among members, which is the basis for taking action. The degree to which Web 2.0 helps to build high-quality connectivity—a motivating relationship—is less clear than its ability to build quantity.
• Web 2.0 clearly is a messaging medium. You can use it to get the word out to more and more people. But here, too, there is a quality vs. quantity concern. As messages are passed along, node to node, what is lost in message fidelity? Does it matter? And what is lost in branding?  Again, the value of Web 2.0’s messaging impact seems to depend on what the network’s strategy is.
• How can the quality of Web 2.0 effects be measured and evaluated?

James Cameron's Avatar tells a story of global sustainability in which the good guys win. The heroes are resisters--a handful of scientists and soldiers who take up arms, commit sabotage, and recruit others to defeat a ruthless industrial-military complex bent on mining a fortune and trampeling the natives. Not a compromiser in sight. In other words, no politicians.

It's a relief to spend a few hours in a movie theater contemplating a world's survival without being exposed to the tradeoffs, hedging, posturing, brinksmanship, spin, foot dragging, and other shenanigans of political leaders. Avatar's aggression trumps Copenhagen's circuitousness.

Cameron could ignore the politicians because he located his sustainability drama in a colonial setting--the politicans were back home somewhere while the exploiters they authorized searched for loot, much as 500 years ago European kings launched explorers to the "new world." We, of course, don't have this luxury. Global warming means everywhere on Earth is "home." And even though many of us are betting on technological solutions, the politicians have key roles to play. In other words, we can't really dump our problems elsewhere and we, as a society, have to decide how to address the problems. Where Avatar poses a clash of civilizations--western, alien, techno culture vs. aboriginal, indigenous, nature culture--our global crisis requires a change of civilization; we must defeat ourselves.

Even with the politics left off-stage, Avatar's happy ending requires several miracles. The western civilization soldier must be transformed by love into an ally of the native blue peoples and then, Lawrence of Arabia style, into their warrior-leader. The world's natural systems must generate an army of powerful beasts to overwhelm the military technology of the intruders. Along the way, there is also inter-species coupling and inter-species life-transfusion. If that sort of magic is the path to the changes we need to save the world, wouldn't it be smarter to bet on our politicians figuring out what to do.

Then again, maybe not. Avatar's conclusion rests on one other factor: greedy, stubborn people remain greedy and stubborn in the face of new information and impending doom. In other words, stupidity rules. But that's only in the movies, right?

Our partners in Urban Sustainability Associates have generated new knowledge, practices, and innovations in many sustainability issue areas:

ü  Replacing Grey Infrastructure with Green Infrastructure (Steve Wise) -- The potential for green infrastructure to replace grey infrastructure is finally getting recognized at the federal level.

ü  Regional Approach to Climate and Energy Planning (John Cleveland)-- Significant economies of scale can be achieved by collaborating at the regional level on climate and energy planning.

ü  Sustainable Economic Development for Communities and Regions (James Nixon) – This comprehensive  paper focuses on the great economic opportunities that are inherent in the economic transformation required by climate change and environmental disruption.

ü  The Greenest Building is the One that Already Exists (Gabriel Works) -- Green new construction isn’t green enough when building renovation is an option – but this calculation isn’t built into climate action decision-making tools.

ü  New National Urban Sustainability Network Launches (Julia Parzen) -- Urban Sustainability Directors hold their first annual meeting in Chicago.

ü  Connecting Planning and Climate Change—Finally! (John Cleveland) -- The planning field finally gets serious about tools to measure the climate impact of their development designs.

ü  For Closing the Climate Gap—The Rise of “Climate Justice” (John Cleveland & Peter Plastrik) – As US cities respond to the challenge of climate change they must grapple with social and economic inequities.

ü  Car Sharing in Chicago: Extending the Transit System (Peter Plastrik) – This fast-spreading innovation defies conventional thinking about Americans’ “love affair” with their cars.

For more about Urban Sustainability Associates.

"Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another."

David Brooks, "The Protocol Society," New York Times, December 22, 2009.

What do you do when a community or organization's culture--the hearts, mind, and habits of its residents or employees--stands in the way of its success? And what do you do if the existing culture won't change? Cultures have an "endurance imperative" and, as David Brooks notes, it's just not easy to get them--through persuasion or mandates or incentives--to morph into something else?

Steve Barr, a prominent and disruptive education reformer in Los Angeles, figured out on the fly how to change the culture of failing high schools. The first year he controlled the school he sealed off the incoming 9th graders from the rest of the school, so the prevailing school culture couldn't infect them and then developed with them the positive culture he wanted. With the other students in the high school--10th through 12th graders--he did the best he could. The second year, the incoming 9th graders joined the now-10th graders as members of the new culture. And so on until the old culture had moved on and been completely replaced by the new culture. In other words, Barr used the automatic annual flow through of students to build what he wanted.

Can the same strategy be applied to communities and neighborhoods that are not "blessed," as Brooks says, with a culture that can succeed in an economy that rewards ideas and innovations?

Of course, the flow-through in a community takes many more years than it does in a high school; it is either a generational change that takes several decades or a residential displacement, a gentrification dynamic, that takes perhaps 5-10 years. But we can see both of these approaches at work in America's cities:

• Educational improvement seeks to make the children of the poor become literate, college-ready, global-minded, and so on--leaving behind the impoverished culture of isolation and low expectations.
• Gentrification through the "greening" of cities--reinventing mass transit systems; improving housing stock energy efficiency; revitalizing cultural amenities--whatever can be done to attract/retain young professionals of the "creative class" to/in the community.

What's often unsaid about these approaches is that they of necessity give up on people trapped in the old culture of the community. To prevent the old culture from reproducing itself, you have to seal off/protect the seeds of new culture--the children and the new residents in town. And you have to resist the old culture's demands. A good example of this is offered by Lou Glazer, president of Michigan Future, writing about Michiganb's economic transition:  

Because of globalization and technology the economy has changed forever... The asset that matters most in an increasingly knowledge-based economy [is] the skill, creativity and entrepreneurship of its residents... [But] most Michiganians want policymakers and community leaders to get their old, good-paying job back for them.

No leader can accomplish this, but no one in the old culture wants to hear that and few, if any, can accept the notion that only the needs of the new culture should be attended to.  Still, Glazer argues, the only path to success is for people to "embrace what's next, rather than hanging on to what once was."

This is where it's easy for communities to get stuck--if they can't change the old culture and, at the same time, can't reject it and commit to building a new one. Trapped in this limbo, they fail to leverage the culturally transformative power of flow through.

We started nuPOLIS.com on President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day. A year later we highlight recent work:

• Regional Approach to Climate and Energy Planning. Significant economies of scale can be achieved by collaborating at the regional level on climate and energy planning
• Toward A Social Innovation Commons. An “information maze” stymies social innovators. Is it a problem with a solution?
• Evolution of an Innovation: Charter Schools. What started as a way to stimulate innovation in education systems is becoming a new model for replacing those systems.

And we recall some of the best of 2009:

• The 10 most viewed nuPOLIS blogs and reports of 2009.
• The contributions of our many partners.

Here are some of the people and some their work:

Julia Parzen is coordinating and raising philanthropic funds for the growing Urban Sustainability Directors Network.

Bob Weissbourd and Riccardo Bodino have developed the Dynamic Neighborhood Taxonomy.

James Nixon is promoting urban sustainability in Brazil and China. (Hmmmm, "Nixon to China.")

Charlene Johnson is developing a charter school in Highland Park, Michigan.

Graham Richard is promoting "green broadband" in small U.S. communities and for U.S. military bases.

Alvaro Lima is raising capital for Digaai.com, a unique social-media Web site for the worldwide Brazilian diaspora.

Joann Neuroth is developing a "charter starter" service for people starting charter schools in Michigan.

Madeleine Taylor is developing new tools for network builders, as part of the Center for Network Impact tool kit.

Margaret Trimer-Hartley is half way through the second year of starting up University Preparatory Science and Math Academy, a middle- and high- charter school in Detroit.

Greg Berry is starting up WISDOM, an online business for social enterprises, and developing a digital platform for rural policy advocates. 

Bill Shutkin is helping to launch Zocalo Solar and its solar mortgage financial product. 

Pam Tate, CEO of CAEL, has plunged into the green jobs field. In addition, CAEL is developing new tools to make Prior Learning Assessments universally available.

Bill Guest at Metrics Reporting, Inc. is partnering with ACT, Inc. to speed adoption of the National Career Readiness Credential (NCRC) as the core foundational skills credentials across all industry segments.

Ted Chen is figuring out how to package the Kellogg Foundation's knowledge about social innovation--created by grantees, consultants, program officers--so that others can use it.

Gabriel Works is promoting building preservation and reuse as a strategy for urban sustainability.   

JeHoon Lee wrapped up the first Korean-American Summit in Washington in November and is planning for the fifth set of fellows in his network, the Korean-American Leadership network (NetKAL).

John Heiss is working with a team developing a design for a charter school in western Wayne County, Michigan.

Brian Tell is deep into starting up Shadeplex, producer of thin-film solar-electric fabric.

Doug Ross is starting a third charter school district in Detroit, in collaboration with the Yes Prep schools in Houston.