around you suspected—which is quite often the result of good design.
Although this is the most important part of the story, it’s still often not good enough for many clients, companies, or business people who just don’t understand why these issues should be dealt with by themselves and their businesses. For them, there is another set of issues that might be more influential in changing their opinions. I won’t go into these in much detail since they aren’t really design issues but following is a list for you to explore further. The better you understand these issues, the more persuasively you can help your company’s and client’s goals align with those of sustainability.
Even the business press regularly reports on sustainability and social responsibility issues. This not only creates validation for sustainability efforts, but it can also exert important peer pressure on business leaders and managers to “get on the bandwagon” before their competitors.
At its heart, sustainability is about efficiency. There’s not a manager or leader in the world who isn’t looking for his or her organization to be more efficient. Being able to reduce expenses—especially at a time when costs of almost everything are skyrocketing—is always good business.
Sustainability is not a fad (changes that are fleeting), it’s a trend (changes that will endure). Whether in the consumer markets or the business markets, more and more customers are concerned with environmental and social issues. There are opportunities for businesses to take advantage of this trend by aligning their brand and promotional efforts with those of the society as a whole—as long as it’s authentic. Otherwise, being exposed for greenwashing is probably worse than not doing anything at all (more about this in Chapter 18).
Customers, shareholders, investors, and other stakeholders are quickly joining the sustainability wave—no matter how they articulate it. Investors (in particular pension, retirement, and other large funds) are moving their money to investments that align with their longer-term values.
For many companies, sustainability focuses on risk mitigation (reducing financial and other costs associated with potential risks), especially for insurance, reinsurance, and health-related companies. Any company with a stake in the long term is looking to mitigate its operational and financial risks over that amount of time.
Governments at all levels are also quickly shifting regulations—especially at the state and local levels—to reinforce and reward organizations that take sustainability seriously. The business world can fight this all they want, but if they lose, they’ll have to make the changes anyway—after their competitors have already mounted the learning curve ahead of them.
What Is a Systems Perspective?
Because sustainability requires a systems perspective, sustainable design must also address the system, whether it is a market, an ecosystem, a social system, or the entire world. This allows the design process of sustainability to address the environment, markets, companies, and people.
It’s easy to understand the concept of a systems perspective: the system is the sum total of everything affected by an activity. A systems perspective requires an appreciation (at a minimum) and an understanding (at best) of how various systems interact with each other. These include environmental, financial, and social systems.
It can be more difficult to understand the boundaries of the systems affected by a particular action and within a particular domain. In addition, measuring these interactions is often faulty, at best. And keeping this perspective in mind during the entire development process isn’t easy. However, it’s possible. You don’t have to create perfect solutions in every way. What you have to do is make conscious, informed considerations across the spectrum of financial, environmental, and social issues, just like you should across the dimensions of customer experience. Your solutions should be better than the baseline (what others devise without considering these issues) and can improve over time.
Consider the impact that population has on everything (see Figure 1.1). All issues addressed being equal, the biggest one is probably overpopulation. Solving this one challenge would have the greatest impact on all of the others. If the world had even one-half of the population it presently has, many of our more pressing problems would simply disappear. At half the population, food and resources would probably be abundant. Population, however, takes literally generations to change. If people, collectively, gave birth to only half the number of children now, it would be 40 or 50 years before the effects would truly be visible. And how can we drastically reduce the earth’s population in any socially acceptable way? China instituted a one-child-per-couple policy to great outcry, and its effect has yet to be truly felt. Could that solution be successful in other cultures? What are our other options?
Figure 1.1.
World population.
Diversity and Resiliency
Perhaps the best way to judge any system or solution is to assess how resilient it is. Systems that are resilient have a greater chance of lasting, evolving, and responding to change. Nature has evolved and proven to be tremendously resilient, which has allowed it to grow, change, and continue for millennia. Cultures and societies that are resilient have the same attributes. Moreover, each of these systems has a mechanism of resiliency and longevity (such as DNA in nature).
In their book, Brittle Power, Amory and Hunter Lovins define systems that are resilient as able to withstand large disturbances from the outside. They describe several attributes of resilient systems:
Employs passive behavior
Employs active feedback (learns and adapts)
Detects faults early
High substitutability and redundancy
Optional interconnectedness (can connect or disconnect when needed)
Promotes diversity
Makes use of standardization
Dispersed
Hierarchically embedded
Stable and flexible
Simple
Makes limited demands on social stability
Accessible
Corporations are more resilient organizations since they’ve been granted personhood, limited liability, and immortality (though these can cause other problems). Since corporations can survive their founders, as well as shield their owners from the actions of their managers, they attract more diverse capital and can govern themselves in ways that offer a great deal of flexibility and strategies.
The problem with diversity is that it’s often not valued in society.
Diversity is one strategy for resiliency since it allows multiple solutions and approaches to solve
