Order

TABLE OF CONTENTS

§ The Natural Step: Early Beginnings
§ The Natural Step and Systems Thinking
     The Challenge of Collaboration
§ The Earth as a System
     Human Beings as Part of Nature's System
     Life as an Evolving System
§ Nonsustainability: What Are the Consequences?
§ Our Global Challenge
§ A First Step: Defining the Framework for the Sustainable Organization
     Creating Sustainable Business
     Understanding Professional Interconnections
     Back-casting: Meeting Tomorrow's Goals with Today's Decisions
     Upstream vs. Downstream: Simplicity Without Reductionism
     The Compass: Sharing System Perspectives
§ A Sustainable Future

EXCERPTS

The Natural Step: Early Beginnings

My earliest ideas about The Natural Step began in 1988, when I was working as a medical doctor and cancer-treatment researcher. During these years, I saw many things that confused me about how we as human beings take care of our habitat. On the one hand, messages from the mass media and the general public made it sound as if people were more interested in getting richer and driving their cars faster than in preserving our environment for the sake of their kids' future. On the other hand, I saw an endless stream of concerned parents come into the hospital with their cancer-diseased children. And these parents were prepared to do anything for their kids. So, something was wrong here: How could both of these descriptions of human nature be true? Despite this deep concern for our children's well being and futures, we seemed to handle the problem of maintaining our environment by fighting instead of cooperating. Was there some way, I asked myself, that we could learn to reach some consensus on how to change?

I decided to consult my scientific colleagues in Sweden—physicists, biologists, ecologists, economists, and so forth, as well as other cancer researchers and some American doctors. I asked them: Could you please help me elaborate the overall principles by which we can stop destroying our own habitat? I knew for certain through my work that people love their kids and care about their future. Therefore, we must care about the habitat that supports all of us.

As a first step, we defined the concept of sustainability as applied to the scientific community here in Sweden. The idea has spread far beyond this community into the Swedish business community and municipalities, and even into government. Today we have encouraged 60 of the largest business corporations and as many municipalities in Sweden to invest, together, billions of dollars in programs that systemically practice the principles of sustainability. Our efforts are also supported by the king in Sweden; thus our population can see that we are a non-commercial organization. We are not linked to party politics, religion, or any other partisan organization, none of which the king can endorse.

Taken together, these organizations form a web of interconnections. They behave as a network, and they do business together. They launch projects, and they work with the prime minister and with politicians to achieve sustainability. Above all, the network's main goal is for all its members to agree on and support the concept of sustainability—to hold the same understanding in their minds about what it is.

The Natural Step is organized as a federation of associations, each group named after its professional focus. The first association, which I started in 1988, was called Scientists for the Environment. It was to this group that I turned with my earlier question about how to save our habitat. Today The Natural Step includes Economists for the Environment, Medical Doctors for the Environment, Nurses for the Environment, Business Leaders for the Environment, and so forth. All together, we total about 10,000 people.

If we think of an entire community as a beautiful tree, we could picture the engineers positioned as one part of the foliage, the economists serving as another part, and so on. Although all these functions serve as separate bunches of "leaves," they all share the same trunk and main branches that nourish the whole system.

Only by sharing the same principles of sustainability, and the same perspectives and perceptions, can these disparate associations cooperate. A soccer team makes an apt analogy. It has a goal keeper, who is good at certain things; some forwards, who are good at other things; some defensemen; and so on, each player highly skilled in and knowledgeable about certain aspects of the game. But how could the players behave as a unified, intelligent body unless they all had the same idea about what soccer is all about? It is the unifying idea that allows us to collaborate. This philosophy forms the underpinnings of The Natural Step.

The Natural Step and Systems Thinking

This concept of the unifying idea behind The Natural Step led me to mull over our organization's connection to systems thinking. Before I encountered the words systems thinking, I had never thought of The Natural Step in such terms. All I knew was that we wanted to achieve sustainability.

But some of the language associated with systems thinking brought to me through Peter Senge's writings struck a chord in me, and I wanted to learn more about how to achieve this seeing of wholes. I began to conclude that we know something about what systems thinking looks like, but we need to get better at putting it into practice.

As many of us know, a system is made up of overall structures or principles, which I liken to the tree's trunk and branches. This trunk is a stable entity and provides the framework for the system. All the details, or the leaves, if you will, are connected to and nourished by that trunk. Going back to the soccer analogy, a team has 11 players, one ball, two goals, and so forth. These rules form the system behind the play, and are irrefutable. No one approaches the referee before the match and asks, "Couldn't we have fourteen players today?"

So, the overall principles—the trunk and branches of the tree—are stable and immutable. It is among the leaves that we find a variety of designs, ideas, and strategies that all spring from and are there to meet the principles. Let's look at the traffic-management system as another example. The core principles—drive on the right side of the road, stop at red lights, and so forth—are there, but each driver has his or her own style and unique destination. From certain perspectives, traffic patterns may appear chaotic, but in a larger sense than they are not: The traffic rules and regulations, which everyone shares and adheres to, provide the structure and framework that maintain overall order in the system. This analogy further demonstrates how important it is that all members of a system live according to the agreed-upon principles: Those who drive on the left side of the road are removed from the system by the traffic police.

This is all so easy to grasp on an individual level, because each of us is a veritable genius when it comes to perceiving systems as organized through principles. All of us, when grappling with something complex, have a natural tendency to aim first for overall principles. And this tendency is not something learned throughout one's early education. On the contrary, we are all born with this ability, but our schooling often obscures it.

Take, for example, the ability to learn language. Infants hear an endless stream of noise—language—coming from people all around them. As we all know from listening to someone talking in a foreign language, speech can sound like an unbroken flow of noise. Before infants can master their own language, they have to rely on overall principles to detect patterns: They might notice, for example, that every time a certain combination of sounds occurs, they get picked up and cuddled.

In this way, infants derive their native language without having a language with which to think. This feat reveals the enormous, natural capacity that we all have for systems thinking. Driving a car is another example: Despite all the detailed information flooding us—other cars turning or passing, changes in the contour of the road, traffic lights that must by obeyed—we are able to filter out the details and focus on the overarching system. We do this so well that we can even daydream or talk on our cellular phones while driving. This ability to filter, categorize, and prioritize information, and to delegate tasks and functions—all automatically—is the hallmark of the human brain. For this purpose, even the most complex and sophisticated supercomputer is like a toy by comparison.

The Challenge of Collaboration

So if our brains are so powerful, why do we have such trouble collaborating? Why does a team make unintelligent choices at the level of principle despite the high intelligence of each of its members? Why, even though we all understand the dangers facing our environment, do we continue to consume our own habitat and threaten our very survival as a species?

Before we get too discouraged, let's remind ourselves that, when we put our minds to it, we humans are capable of amazing feats of teamwork. For example, the United States' achievement in putting a man on the moon in the 1960s required unprecedented coordination and training of a myriad of different contributors—astronomers, physiologists, physicists, fuel experts, computer specialists, and so forth. The project succeeded because every one of its participants accepted and shared the overall principles involved. Each contributor was working with the same set of assumptions: the distance between the Earth and the moon, the conditions on the moon's surface, and most important, the value in the goal itself. So, focusing on the overall principles can hold the key to achieving any goal.