Page 24 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

NARRATING VALUES, SHAPING VALUES, CREATING VALUE 3

out, lies at the crux of business practices today, squaring a short-term focus on growth
and profits with a longer-term focus on having that profit mean something. The story
invites us to think more deeply about integrating value creation with practicing values.

Narrating Values:

A Tale of Two Capitalisms

All of us tell stories. Stories such as my father’s help us make sense of the complex
world we live in, provide order and meaning. The historian Hayden White, in his sem-
inal study Metahistory, examines five famous versions of the French Revolution.
Depending on the particular facts each of the five historians selected (and the facts
each historian ignored) and the way in which each historian ordered those facts, a very
different version of the French Revolution emerges: a tragedy, a romance, a comedy. 1
Writing almost a decade later, the psychologists Kahneman and Tversky more or
less underscored White’s work by pointing out that the stories we shape to provide
2
meaning are informed by personal biases. Biases are the basis of our decision-making
process. One bias Kahneman and Tversky discuss is something they termed “confir-
mation bias,” which entails the strong tendency among all of us to scan a field of data
for those pieces of information that confirm what we already believe to be true and
ignore whatever data do not fit our belief system. White’s argument about selection
and ordering as the key components of storytelling and Kahneman and Tversky’s
notion of confirmation bias are two distinct academic versions of the same thing: All
of us are actively engaged in creating stories that confirm our various views of the
world. As the historian Jeremy Rifkin notes:

I would suggest that throughout history, people’s experience of reality begins with cre-
ating a story about themselves and the world and that story acts as a kind of cultural
baseline DNA for the all the evolutionary permutations that follow. 3

What does all of this have to do with sustainable business practices? A lot, as it
turns out.
All of us are bombarded with facts and information and stories every day of our
lives. A colleague or friend is laid off from work after many years of loyal service to
a company and now, in her forties, has the experience but lacks certain skills such that
finding a new job seems hopeless. We get an e-mail from an acquaintance trying to
raise money for someone who lacks the necessary medical insurance for an expensive
operation. We share with neighbors and friends stories about ourselves and our kids as
they spend seemingly endless hours on homework and recreation and community
service and as we try to balance our own work lives with spending time with them.
We hear news about job creations here and job cuts there, rising mortgage rates and
lower cost of consumer goods, the competition to get into good universities and hence