At the heart of 7group’s essence is a web of interrelationships. From the very beginning, we have woven individuals and organizations into a loose, rather organic form, a set of relationships aligned around a direction for a particular purpose – transforming how we are thinking to align with the way nature works. We view the growth and development of our company as a living system, trying to be native and contributory to our place and not behave in invasive ways, not seeking to grow for the sake of growth in an effort to dominate and “weed” out the competition. We are not competitive; therefore, we have no competition.

In the late 90s and early 2000s, we helped to create the market for green buildings. In the early days of LEED, there were very few companies who were engaged in the work we did. The market was growing by leaps and bounds and we had the opportunity to grow, as a typical company might, by hiring more staff and pursuing more and more projects. When faced with this choice, we deliberately chose to not grow hierarchically by hiring more staff. We decided to focus on being selective, taking only those projects with higher than normal aspirations, working with project teams who wanted to dig deeper and ask more meaningful questions. We chose to focus on the quality of our relationships. We chose to grow our network instead of growing the company. We seek to align with those of like mind and those seeking to view the world through a regenerative lens. We are more interested in transformative change than we are in generating profits. We engage with diverse communities of people with differing perspectives and experiences to create change in ourselves as the first step towards manifesting change in the world.

Up until recently, we engaged this web of relationships behind the scenes. We have updated the about page on our website to reveal this web of interconnections. This includes people who work with us directly – our co-conspirators – and people we work with regularly in a wide variety of capacities toward a common aim – our co-operators. These folks represent a small part of our growing web of interrelationships. Perhaps you feel an alignment with our work, our direction and aim and have a longing to join in that work? While the growth we seek has a clear aim and general direction, we have no preconceived notion of what might emerge in the process of regenerating our web.

This poem captures our approach with more clarity than we can conjure. We look forward to continuing the process of discovering what fits within the center and along the entropic edges of our web.

“Identity”
by A.R. Ammons

1) An individual spider web
identifies a species:

an order of instinct prevails
through all accidents of circumstance,
though possibility is
high along the peripheries of
spider
webs:
you can go all
around the fringing attachments

and find
disorder ripe,
entropy rich, high levels of random,
numerous occasions of accident:

2) the possible settings
of a web are infinite:

how does
the spider keep
identity
while creating the web
in a particular place?

how and to what extent
and by what modes of chemistry
and control?

it is
wonderful
how things work: I will tell you
about it
because

it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
and stars and spider webs
and known
is loved:
in that love,
each of us knowing it,
I love you,

for it moves within and beyond us,
sizzles in
to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees
by summer windowsills:

I will show you
the underlying that takes no image to itself,
cannot be shown or said,
but weaves in and out of moons and bladderweeds,
is all and
beyond destruction
because created fully in no
particular form:

if the web were perfectly pre-set,
the spider could
never find
a perfect place to set it in: and

if the web were
perfectly adaptable,
if freedom and possibility were without limit,
the web would
lose its special identity:

the row-strung garden web
keeps order at the center
where space is freest (intersecting that the freest
“medium” should
accept the firmest order)

and that
order
diminishes toward the
periphery
allowing at the points of contact
entropy equal to entropy.

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