Revisiting Applied Hope

On the eve of a major US political transition, Amory Lovins explores why Applied Hope continues to guide RMI in the years ahead.

More than 40 years ago, RMI’s co-founder Amory Lovins founded the institute and oriented it around the concept of Applied Hope. On the eve of a major US political transition and geopolitical shifts globally, Lovins explores why the concept is as relevant today as it has ever been, and how it will continue to guide RMI in the years ahead.

I co-founded RMI on April 26, 1982 with my wife at the time — Hunter Lovins. Since then, we have all come a long way and learned a lot. And it’s important to understand our past in order to understand where we are and where we’re going.

RMI’s initial work spanned far more issues than energy. However, amid the tangle of population resources, security, economy, environment, and global development, energy was our biggest focus, reflecting my 1960s conclusion that energy is a master key that could unlock, or teach us how to address, all those other issues too.

While energy was the major focus in our early years, we also did influential work in water, agriculture, global security, vehicle and industrial design, and local economic development. Some of those topics are now reemerging to enable today’s energy efforts.

It was also clear, even in the 1960s, that advanced resource efficiency could turn scarcity by inattention into abundance by design™. It could replace penury with sufficiency, envy with contentment, conflict with comity, trade-off with synergy, and costs with profits.

So RMI was built to discover how to wring far more benefit from energy, water, materials, and other resources, how to do far more and better with less, for longer. We hope this would reveal how to meet the needs of a secure, just, prosperous, and life-sustaining world…by innovative design, technology, business strategy, and public policy, all artfully combined, rigorously applied, and vigorously promoted. This effort required transforming design, busting barriers, and spreading innovation.

From those basic concepts have flowed 43 years of ever-deepening detail.

For me, the glass is neither half empty nor half full. It’s just twice as big as it needs to be, and further expandable by efficiency. Many of us at RMI, in the same spirit, have learned not to be optimists or pessimists. Those are different kinds of fatalist — treating the future as fate, not choice, rather than taking responsibility for creating the future we want.

As Francis Moore Lappé said, “Hope is a stance, not an assessment.” You can’t depress people into action.

So the most solid foundation for feeling better about the future is to improve it tangibly, durably, reproducibly, scalably. Now is the time to be practitioners, not theorists; to be synthesists, not specialists; to do solutions, not problems; to do transformation, not incrementalism. It’s time to shift language and action from “somebody should” to “I will,” to do real work on real projects, and to go to scale.

The most solid foundation for feeling better about the future is to improve it tangibly, durably, reproducibly, scalably. Now is the time to be practitioners, not theorists; to be synthesists, not specialists; to do solutions, not problems; to do transformation, not incrementalism. It’s time to shift language and action from “somebody should” to “I will,” to do real work on real projects, and to go to scale.

To do that, we need to understand how everything is connected. Many of today’s problems are caused by previously implemented “solutions” because we didn’t understand their connections. We should instead harness hidden connections so the cause of solutions is solutions; and we can solve, or better still avoid, not just one problem but many, without making new ones.

Economic Renewal — our process and toolkit for building a sustainable local economy in communities with failing extractive industry — is that type of solution and could help our work today. The ideas put forth in Natural Capitalism continue to provide a deep context for everything we do. It’s about productively using and reinvesting in capital — counting not only physical and financial capital, but also natural and human capital, the two most precious kinds. If you play with a full deck, with all four kinds of capital, you do more good, make more profit, and have a lot more fun.

[Economic Renewal] is about productively using and reinvesting in capital — counting not only physical and financial capital, but also natural and human capital, the two most precious kinds. If you play with a full deck, with all four kinds of capital, you do more good, make more profit, and have a lot more fun.

All these strands of work have won of us valuable respect and alliances across the whole political spectrum, including long collaboration with the US military, which we helped turn into the federal government’s leader in adopting energy efficiency and renewables for its own mission success.

RMI plays the long game. We drive half-century, transformative change in some of the biggest, most complex, most habit-driven, trapped-equity-ridden, locked-in systems on the planet. Therefore we are mainly strategic where many others are tactical.

It’s very complex to figure out which decision-makers in the future will need to have what idea, when, and from what source so they’ll believe it; in what circumstances so they’ll act on it; and with what opposition pre-neutralized. That’s hard to measure — but it works.

For decades RMI’s foresight and insight has deeply influenced the electricity, real estate, automotive trucking, and many other industries, and laid many of the foundations of the emerging new energy era.

We have already come a surprisingly long way with so many partners in leveraging big changes in the US economy that is a million times bigger than our budget.

Our level of ambition reflects a remark by one of my mentors, the inventor Edwin Land, who said, “Never undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.”

But Henry Ford said, “Whatever is worthy and right is never impossible.” And he added, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.”

Well, we’ve shown that we can.

RMI is such an unusual organization. We helped invent the entrepreneurial nonprofit, yet we engage intently with commerce; we help shape policy, yet we remain scrupulously apolitical and nonpartisan. I know of no other group in the world quite like us.

Our dominant, so far exclusive change model for many years was to understand the sector or field, figure out a highly efficient restorative practice offering big competitive advantage, work with carefully chosen early adopters to apply that practice with conspicuous success, and help lower the barriers to its wide adoption, thereby compelling other firms and rivals to choose whether they want to follow suit or lose market share.

Of course we don’t try to do everything ourselves. When others can do some parts better, we try to enlist, cajole, catalyze, or support their efforts, moving in a cloud of allies and partners. Corporations too are not just our advisors or advisees. We’re all in the trenches together, sometimes alongside their traditional adversaries.

Yet, despite all these complex collaborations, we’re known and respected for saying exactly what we think, because we fiercely guard our independence.

Even before RMI existed, the US federal government faced challenges such as partisan divisions and a high likelihood of gridlock. So we structured RMI not to depend on federal policy reform or support. That proved a good idea. Our market orientation, emphasizing practical solutions led by business for profit, has served us well. Why directly challenge the most entrenched centers of influence when we can strategically navigate around them through collaborative business-led initiatives and by engaging constructively with key decision-makers? And why work only with national leaders when most choices are made at state and local levels, or by firms?

RMI is not an environmental group: our goals are much broader. We were historically not a climate-centric group either. Our task is to speed the energy transition, not convince people of the urgency of the climate threat. Obsessive self-righteousness doesn’t advance our mission; broadly appealing solutions do. We persuade people by delivering the diverse outcomes of a clean, prosperous, just, and secure energy future, without imposing specific motives. In short, we focus on outcomes, not motives: on what we can do together, not why each of us might want to.

RMI is inclusive, non-positional, and non-adversarial. We listen empathetically and try sincerely to see all sides. Though we often give advice that may be unwelcome or challenging, we don’t treat anyone as the enemy. As Abraham Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” We learn best what to do by talking to those who disagree with us. As Tào Té Chīng 61 says, a great man “considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers. He thinks of his enemy as the shadow that he himself casts.”

So how do we induce institutions a million times our size to pursue their self-interest in a way that fulfills our mission? What tools help us do this magic?

Four decades have refined a toolkit including end-use/least-cost analysis; biomimetic inspiration; biophilic design; design charrettes; convenings; whole-system integration; and restorative technologies. We strive to make our work transparent, with an optimal degree of sloppiness. And our best work comes from cultivating “beginner’s mind”: opening ourselves to new ideas by letting go of old ideas, shedding all assumptions and preconceptions.

If we worked only with saints, we’d have few clients and make little change. A partner needn’t share all our views and aims, nor we theirs, to produce the results we both want.

If we worked only with saints, we’d have few clients and make little change. A partner needn’t share all our views and aims, nor we theirs, to produce the results we both want.

We treat market economics as a valuable tool to be used with vigor, discretion, and restraint — not as a goal in itself. Markets are very good at what they do well: short-term allocation of scarce resources. They make a great tool, a bad master, and a worse religion. As Natural Capitalism said, “Markets are meant to be efficient, not sufficient; aggressively competitive, not fair. Markets were never meant to achieve community or integrity, beauty or justice, sustainability or sacredness—and, by themselves, they don’t. To fulfill the wider purpose of being human, civilizations have invented politics, ethics, and religion. Only they can reveal worthy goals for…the economic process.” Thus we’re market-oriented as to tools, but not market fundamentalists as to purpose. We use markets as a considered tool, not an ideological goal.

We also try to follow aikidō principles and practices. This vigorous but nonviolent martial art (“blending energy way” or “way of combining forces”) is a refined, fluid, and seemingly effortless way to blend with the attacker’s motion and redirect the attacker’s force harmlessly past, rather than staying rigidly fixed in a position in the hope that the attacker will bounce off. This helps us redirect incumbent industries’ size and force from blocking change to driving change, by applying centeredness, flow, leverage, and up-close, hands-on engagement.

In aikidō politics, you don’t fight with an opponent; you dance with a partner. You honor others’ beliefs as you would your own, even if you think they’re wrong. You’re committed to process, not outcome, in the belief that a good process will yield better outcomes than anyone had in mind in the first place — and then your responsibility is to ensure that whoever needs to take credit for the outcome will do so, whether they deserve it or not. The resulting change is like water: being substanceless, it can enter in even where there are no cracks.

Another valuable tool is “institutional acupuncture.” Where the business logic is congested, we insert metaphorical needles into carefully chosen points in complex organizations or relationships to get this qì (vital energy, like entrepreneurial juice) flowing properly in the channels and directions it already naturally follows — the Taoist wú wéi concept of not interfering but going with the flow. That flow erodes or even blasts through blockages from within. Tào Té Chīng 63 advises:

Act without doing;
work without effort.
Think of the small as large
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts.

Verse 78 reinforces the point:

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

One must be exquisitely sensitive to the way things want to go, then ever so gently adjust little trimtabs to help them go that way, while remaining unswervingly fixed on our highest goals. When we get really good at this, by doing nothing, nothing will be left undone.

All these tools, mindsets, and methods are integral to our vision, mission, strategy, culture, positioning, and style. Together, they form the Tao of RMI.

If these Taoist concepts are unfamiliar, just let them grow on you, because there’s not a moment to waste. This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the real thing, our moment onstage, and humanity has — we have — just one chance to get it right. We humans are the first self-endangered species. Let us not be the last.

That’s where we are. That’s who we are. That’s why we’re here.