"SOCIAL, ECOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY"
When we think of social, ecological and economic sustainability, what appears in our mind is that
It Is More About Competence And Values:
Sustainable development is about planning for a future that can be. A sustainable society, as well as a sustainable organization, is about running an economy that does not systematically erode the social and ecological fabric on which the society is based. No trend will put demands on strategic leadership than this challenge. Yet, many heads of organizations believe that it is all about 'values' and that the strategic challenge is about being rewarded by citizens and customers for marketing better values than competitors. People would, with this way of looking at it, be prepared to pay more for products that include the 'environment' and 'social responsibility' as a widened aspect of the quality they purchased and thereby positively affect the Brand of the organization. The will to invest in environmental or social benefits would then be directly proportional to the expected marginal profit.
But this is not the greatest challenge. Competent leaders, be it Minister/Governor
/Mayor/CEO/Board, know that it is more about avoiding unnecessary and increasing costs that are unavoidable for those organization that stay being part of the problem. In the end, it is about survival of the organization as well as civilization at large. All values will go down the gurgler if we fail with 'Sustainable Development'. So in the end, whilst values are essential, strategic planning towards social and ecological sustainability demands increased competence amongst our leaders.
A Funnel Of Declining Potential To Sustain Our Economies:
Today, global human society is moving deeper and deeper into into a 'funnel' of declining opportunities to sustain prosperity, and in the end civilization itself. Our habitat, the biosphere, is exposed to ever higher concentrations of 'left-over-matter' in the biosphere, ie: social waste as well as solid and molecular wastes, smaller areas of remaining ecosystems, shrinking biodiversity, and fewer health cultures where people are glued together by trust in each other and by vital stories of meaning. When the very meaning of the connectedness between people looses character, it leads to vicious cycles. The worse we feel socially, the more narrow-minded and individual focused our culture becomes. This decreases our enthusiam to design a socially and ecologically sustainable society, damaging impacts in those systems grow worse and we have even lower trust in each other and the future. But this is also an opportunity od specified dimensions, to the leadership of our time: to create attractive visions that are socially and ecologically sustainable, to stubbornly stick to them, and to learn how to communicate all kinds of measures and investments as socially/ financially/politically smart stepping-stones on the way.
Enlightened Self-Interest To Be Part Of The Solution And Avoid The Walls Of The Funnel:
Today, most organizations are part of the un-sustainability problem, systematically 'contributing' to increasing amounts of waste and molecular waste (e.g. toxic waste and greenhouse gasses), enroaching on ecosystems (e.g. deforestation and draining of ground water tables) and erosion of the social fabric (e.g. bad health, stress, and underpaid suppliers from developing countries). Soon there will be a lot of billion (11) people, no longer 6, laying claims on the remaining natural resources in the biosphere. It can be shown with scientific rigor, that this leads inevitably to increased financial risks for the individual organization, risks that are associated with costs for natural resources, waste management, insurance, taxation and flawed investments that lead into blind alleys. And the opposite is also true. Systematic innovation and design to provide human services without contributing to the sustainability problem implies systematically less risk of financial consequences from social and environmental impacts.
Strategic Planning Implies That We Know What We Want:
The most commonly applied methodology for planning, forecasting, is on its own quite useless for strategic thinking around sustainability. It means to 'forecast' our assumptions, based on current trends, into the future and then try to fix the problems we can foresee. The complexity of the system 'the individual, in the organization, in society, in biosphere' simply means that this way of planning by trends is the perfect way of solving one problem by inventing another. An example is when we introduced CFC's to replace the irritant gas ammonia as coolant in freezers, only to discover that the replacement had begun to erode the life-supporting ozone layer. Strategic innovation and design implies the opposite, namely to imagine a 'thorough sustainable future' and then to plan systematically to arrive at it. How can we define success in the future? "Nobody can look into the future" Einstein said, "But we can invent it" he added.
Backcasting From Principles:
The Natural Step International, an NGO founded in Sweden in 1989 has pioneered an international scientific consensus process aimed at defining a rigorous Framework for Sustainability. It is presented - in peer reviewed scientific journals as well as in case studies in business and policy-making, in a format that allows strategic planning for any organization or planning activity at any scale. At the same time, it provides strict guidelines for how to select and design the necessary tools for decision support. The method is built on basic principles for achieving the objective, an attractive vision f the organization in a sustainable future.
It is a unique planning methodology for design and innovation, which tackles problems at the root causes of un-sustainability. It allows for a rich diversity of cultural and technical solutions. To imagine success in the future, defined all the way down to the basic principle level, and then to plan systematically to arrive at that imagined point is called 'Backcasting From Principles' (as opposed to 'Forecasting From Trends'). The framework is designed to do this in a strategic way.This means to identify investments that not only stand for good chance to give good social/financial/political returns, but also lay the foundations for father investments tomorrow. Or in other words - how to link short term actions with longer term goals from a sustainability perspective. The vision should contain much more than sustainability, but if the vision is not based on sustanability, the transition is likely to fail socially, financially and politically.
What Are The Challenges To Leadership And Management?
Sustainable Development is a very complex issue that requires leaders of Governments/Regions/ Business and their teams to think in a different way than is common today.
In today's world senior executives are often too busy to engage properly with the mid to long-term survival of their respective organizations.
In business, the quarterly reports occur at the expense of the strategic question: "How can we make money today in a way that makes it possible to make money also tomorrow?" Even leaders who are pro-active on environmental and social issues often lack on overall framework for sustainability.
Consequently, they have vague images on how to define sustainability, and how it relates to the bottom line. This leads to an incompetent management of the largest challenge that any organization has ever been exposed to.
Amongst many misconceptions, modern leaders often believe that:
(I) Concerns about sustainability implies a focus on the long term at the expense of the short term, whereas reality tells us that it is the opposite way around; strategic thinking means, to ensure that short term investments can serve as platforms for the longer term which promotes innovation, good design and competitive success in all time.
(II) "The Sustainability Issues" will only pay back when the market understands the issues and wants to reward proactive organizations by being prepared to pay more for their products and services; where as in reality ; the biggest strategic incentive for sustainable development is to avoid increasing costs, and the largest risks are run by those who are violating the basic principles for sustainability, regardless of whether we yet know the exact impacts from those, and/or how to measure them, or not.
(III) The sustainability aspects of the market place are so complex that only experts can deal with them; whereas reality tells us that experts, though knowledgeable in specific areas, are generally amateurs on strategic planning in the context of the whole system; that dimension cannot be abandoned by top management and handed over to experts or middle management or consultants or any other group, it will always remain the responsibility of top management itself.
What Is The Natural Step Experience .....
As regards how to attract Business to Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability?
At the moment, a crisis is the most common route to increased awareness. Many companies came out relatively early and made economic progress by taking sustainability issues more seriously. They often did so because of crisis - financial, competitive, or pressure from various kinds of actors such as politicians, official institutions and NGO's. Business in general needs to get ahead of the game. Reaction to crisis, i.e. hitting the walls of the funnel rather than avoiding it, is usually much more expensive for everyone. Perhaps, the most exciting thing with a company is its openness, and that they are challenging their whole industry to develop the same way.
What is The Natural Step's Experience In Attracting Regions and Local Government To Strategic Leadership Towards Sustainability?
In working with Local Governments & Regions, there are very strong similarities to big businesses. Regions have at least as great a need for visions that comply with basic sustainability principles, and which must be financially sound at the same time. The need to create constructive leadership through shared mental modes, to allow creative innovation, enthusiasm and genuine participation in decision-making is perhaps even stronger in the the public sector. The issues that are dealt with the public agencies, whether international or local are almost always complex and involve many different interests. So the sustainability perspective and working from sound principles for sustainability, is a really important.
But there are also differences. One of the most obvious is Local Government's division into non-elected officials on one hand and political leaders on the other. Politicians risk being exchanged each election period. Another difference is that local and national government's 'Story of Meaning' its purpose, is generally broader than that of the business organization, and consciously includes care in all society's functions and sectors. Finally, it is about management of course where democracy is often, unlike the business organization, institutionalized. These differences may speak in favor of a greater need for shared mental modes than in business.
This is the experience that the gratitude of getting support with visioning within the sustainability constraints, and drawing both strategic and practical conclusions, is at least as great in local governments as in business.
Does Sustainability Deliver Concrete Benefits To Organizations?
The strategic dimension of the sustaninability game is all about investing in "flexible platforms", i.e. investments that are both economically feasible in the short term and can serve as strategic stepping-stones to a sustainable future.
Further ahead, when more people in society wake up to the necessities of sustainable development, investments that are perceived as too radical today will be recognized as smart moves for social/financial/political reasons, in a positive spiral. We call such investments 'flexible platforms', i.e. investments that can be furthered because they do not lead into blind alleys. Organizations investing in sustainable strategies can see a good return. They save by avoiding increasing costs for energy, tax, insurance, waste management, and they earn money through product and service innovation, competitive advantage, customer and employee loyalty, increased shareholder value and social health in general. So called 'trade offs', i.e. an investment that is good for something and bad for something else, is not dealt with my comparing evils, but by seeking smartest investment paths to success in the future. To take this seriously provides in itself a story of meaning, one that can create mutual connection and trust between people within and between organizations and the general public, thereby bridging the big cultural gap of our time.
Do Adequate Adaptation Technologies Exist To Leaders To Weather A Shift To Sustainable Production And Consumption?
Yes, but one should not wait for more technologies until the change process in society takes-off, but rather select or develop them as they are needed. What is needed is less about new fancy tools for the management of sustainability, and more about the competence related to the big picture. Leaders of today are ofter delaying solutions that are actually very close at hand. Sometimes, we devote more competence to measuring and monitoring than to deciding what needs to be measured and monitored.
A good piece of advice to our leaders throughout society is to learn how to create the big all embracing plan towards sustainable success, and get on with business planning right away. Then you can develop the sophisticated tools and concepts as needed. The tools and technologies also need to be informed by the all embracing plan and its principles. Organizations should not be inspired by something, but measuring and monitoring something else. This may appear self-evident. But the sad reality is that various kinds of tools and key figures for sustainability often blur the big picture rather than support it. Boards and leaders are often happily ignorant about the fact that the whole organization is headed right towards the walls of the funnel. All investments, in particular the large ones that lock down capital and capacity for a long time, should be scrutinized from a principled sustainability perspective.
Are There Physical Constraints For An Attractive Sustainable World?
Of course there are physical limits, boundaries to the system - that is the whole point. But from the sustainability perspective (i.e. when planning by backcasting) there are no constraints as regards renewable natural resources or energy, techniique, economy, or successful brands and other kinds of financial business aspects. But there is a possible constraint: "WE WILL GET ENOUGH COMPETENT LEADERS IN TIME?
TONY R. MONTERAS (malaking ibon)
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
15 April 2009 / 10 Rabi'II 1430 H
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