Monday, April 7, 2014

Avoiding the Broken-Leg Approach to Sustainability

When any organization starts an environmental sustainability effort, all stakeholders should ask what the reason or reasons are for doing it. By cruising the web and reading about the sustainability programs of any number of businesses and governments one quickly sees how many of these organizations are challenged in answering this simple question, Why?
The most frequently-stated answer is, because we care.
Right.
And then begins their lists of “sustainability” activities: office waste recycling, energy efficient lighting upgrades, reductions in water usage for manufacturing, LEED certification of buildings, maybe some carbon offsets and solar panels. These all probably sound familiar.
Having a laundry list of “green” activities is helpful to the environment to some extent and might save money for the organization. But in the grand scheme of things this doesn't necessarily make the client organization more sustainable.
Is it simply a greenwash, for PR purposes? Is it the naïve tendency of the organization's leaders to take some benign feel-good actions to improve workforce morale? Whatever the real reason, we all could use a better answer to Why?
And also to How?
Here is an article by Dr. Kevin Lynch that concisely answers both questions better than any I have seen before. The Hidden Price of Simplifying Sustainability: Rethinking How We Think about Sustainable Systems
It starts with the use of the term, sustainability. The designer Bill McDonough has often observed how the term itself falls short if only in that it lacks a capacity to inspire people. As McDonough jokes, people are not inclined to answer the friendly question,
“How's your marriage going?”
with
“It's sustainable.”
Despite its shortcomings the term sustainability carries with it meaning that goes beyond “environmental”, beyond “green.” Absent a better term at our disposal Kevin Lynch provides a definition for sustainability so clear, so complete that I will restate it here:

Sustainability is the careful and efficient stewardship of resources by businesses, communities and citizens. It is the practice of meeting our needs in ways that are respectful of future generations and restorative of natural, cultural, and financial assets. Sustainable management is a whole systems approach to achieving superior performance in delivering desired outcomes to all stakeholders by business, government, and civil society. It is achieved by implementing the three principles of Natural Capitalism which are (1) Buy time by using resources dramatically more productively, (2) Redesign industrial processes and the delivery of products and services to do business as nature does, using such approaches as biomimicry and cradle to cradle, and (3) Manage all institutions to be restorative of natural and human capital. 
- courtesy of the website for Natural Capitalism Solutions

Lynch goes on to make the case for taking a whole-systems approach to sustainability as advocated by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline.
We all live and work within systems, some of which are physical and some products of the human imagination. Either type of system can add complexity so severe that we are compelled to reducing them into rational components which we can more easily describe and analyze.
For example while seeking medical care we may visit a general practitioner, but when we are really sick we prefer seeing the cardiologist, the oncologist, the ENT, etc. And so our sustainability programs are rationalized into water, air, materials, people, wildlife, and so on.
We certainly need to rationalize for help solving a specific problem such as a broken leg…but not in planning for sustainability.
Not without a whole-systems approach can we adequately see the consequences of our actions; we lose our intrinsic sense of connection to a larger whole. Living organisms, ecosystems, the Earth are not machines. They work and thrive not simply as a sum of discrete components or compartments. Neither should a sustainability program.
Rationalization in this way prevents us from adequately accounting for the harm caused by our enterprises, although the associated costs of this harm haven't disappeared. Someone winds up paying for unsustainable behavior as externalized costs, which is economist-speak for unclaimed costs that are eventually paid for by society or some unwitting portion of society. This is anathema to those who advocate for free-markets, as the externalized costs provide is no disincentive for bad behavior. The market then fails in serving our interests.
Also when we rationalize we respond with actions that only treat symptoms instead of root causes. We fail to identify leverage points in these complex systems where our actions return maximum benefit.
This reminds me of a case study that Charles Duhig included in his book, The Power of Habit.
In 1987 Paul O'Neil was taking over the reins as CEO of the metals industry giant Alcoa, whose profits were sagging to the dismay of investors. He soon announced his corporate turnaround strategy: reduce occupational injury rates as close to zero as possible. Industry insiders and stock analysts responded with a collective, “Huh?”
But O'Neil understood that turning around his company depended on changing the ingrained company culture and the patterns of behavior of the employees. Alcoa, like all complex human enterprises, operates by systems within systems, and every day his employees were making thousands of individual decisions that resulted in waste and lost potential.
So O'Neil launched his accident elimination initiative, involving every single worker and manager in his operations. This began a widespread culture change at Alcoa's factories. How “Keystone Habits” Transformed a Corporation
To shift worker safety habits, O'Neill created more open policies governing the way that workers and communicated. This and other measures began to produce results.
Over the following 10 years it became five times safer to work at Alcoa. On average the workers are more likely to get injured at a software company, animating cartoons for movie studios, or doing taxes as an accountant than handling molten aluminum at an Alcoa factory.
But this is where the magic starts, because O’Neil’s program was intervening at a behavioral leverage point. By changing some of their keystone habits it became easier to move his employees to improve their behaviors in other ways, especially in allowing them to take more ownership of the results they produced. That lifted profits.
O'Neill helped push Alcoa's annual earnings from 20 cents per share in 1994 to $1.41 in 1999, when he stepped down. He also helped boost sales an average of 15% per year in the same period.
“Having ideas that are related to each other is really a useful way of thinking about things,” O'Neill said. “It's hard to find people these days who think in holistic ways.”
That’s systems thinking. While this example does not relate directly to sustainability, I hope you can see how broadly this applies to activities in our personal and professional lives.
This is how your approach to planning for sustainability differs from the approach you take to solving a simple illness. Once you charter your organization's sustainability program to answer the question why?, systems thinking becomes part of the how?.

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