A New Vision for an Interdependent Planet
Excerpt from Peter Senge's Video Keynote from the 2005 Pegasus Conference

In his keynote presentation at the 2005 Pegasus Conference, Peter Senge examined some of the factors that make it so hard for us to understand the complex interdependencies that connect us to each other. First, he suggested that the accelerated pace of change that we are living today has brought us to a place of unprecedented complexity where it is fair to say “we have never been here before.” Second, he observed that we simply have not fully developed our natural capacity to see the systems of which we are a part. And finally, he noted that we are challenged to expand our temporal and spatial horizons to see beyond the limits of our own perception to anticipate the impact and consequences of the choices we make.

It seems to me that this image of “beyond the horizon” is really an important one for us to embrace, because we can expand our horizons, both spatial and temporal; the horizon is not fixed.

Many of you in business know that one of the most effective things you can do to extend your spatial horizon is to just go out and visit customers and suppliers. We have strategies for expanding our spatial horizon. And oftentimes, this comes down to talking with people, visiting people, seeing first hand. You don’t have to live in India to appreciate the lives of people in India. But you have to see it some time first hand. And of course, you have to get to know the people. Then they become real to you. The same is true in your supply chain and inside of your organization. It’s kind of mundane to say it, but without a doubt, one of the primary strategies for systems thinking that I’ve seen for twenty-five years in countless organizations, is to simply get people together. They talk, they see each other face to face, and all of a sudden this network of interdependency is not an abstraction; it’s real human beings.

Now, in many ways, the temporal horizon is trickier. How do I expand my temporal horizon? We’re interdependent in space and time. Things I do today affect my kids and my grandkids; things that other people do affect them. Things that were done twenty, thirty, fifty years ago, affect us today. This is a huge puzzle, and it’s always been one of the core puzzles in the systems field. But I believe that once we see the problem, we find ways of dealing with it.

I want to use an example from the climate change area, and my reason is very simple. In some sense, this is tangible; it can be seen. Secondly, it really matters a lot. And there’s absolutely no reason in my opinion, that we do not have a broad based consensus in the world – cutting across every imaginable political, religious, and cultural boundary – of the simple facts of the matter. The implications are different for everybody, and obviously there are lots of debates as to what to do. But it’s hard to get to those questions if we don’t have the facts.

The three graphs (click here for graphs in new window) you see here show the facts that every one of us needs to understand about carbon dioxide concentration, carbon dioxide emissions, and temperature in the world for the last 150 years. These come from the UN Intergovernmental Commission on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/).

The bottom graph shows average temperature for the last 150 years. And you can see it goes up and down; there are all kinds of short term cycles in temperature. And you can see that there’s a trend – most people would say a pretty obvious trend – in the last 75 years. The average temperature in the world has gone up approximately one degree. Now, people will say, “So, what’s one degree?” Mr. Putin, before he was pressured into having Russia join the Kyoto Protocols said what a lot of people had on their mind, “Hey, one degree? I live in Russia. That sounds pretty good! I would go for two or three degrees.” It might make a longer growing season, right?

Recently, I read an eminent economist in the United States who said the exact same thing. He said the economic analysis suggests that one or two degrees, on average, in the United States would probably be good for our economy. This is what happens when we don’t see beyond our temporal horizon. We look at right now.

The middle graph shows carbon dioxide concentration during the same time period, 1850 to 2000. And you’ll see that it’s risen about thirty percent, because of course, there was lots of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prior to the industrial age. So, it isn’t a zero-based axis; it’s risen about 30 percent. The lower left corner of that graph shows the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before the industrial revolution started to spread around the world. That point, 100 years ago, was close to a peak carbon dioxide concentration for the last 400,000 years. What you see is that carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is now 30 percent higher than any time in the last 400,000 years.

The upper graph shows the rate of emissions from combusting fossil fuels. This is the amount of carbon dioxide that’s been pushed into the atmosphere, in terms of tons per year, in the last 150 years. You can see that that’s an explosive curve.

Now, here’s the puzzle for seeing beyond the time horizon. How do we expand our temporal horizon? Actually systems thinking has a few very foundational ideas which really help – like bathtubs. It’s simple; and this is why I believe that there is no good reason why everybody on the planet doesn’t share a basic understanding of the facts. But first you have to know what facts to ask for.

The upper curve shows carbon dioxide emissions. Think of it like the flow of water into a bathtub. The central curve shows the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – already, as I said, 30% higher than it’s been in 400,000 years. Think of that as the level of the bathtub. Now, you ask any five year old what else you need to know to see what’s going to happen to this bathtub, and they will immediately ask, “Well, how much is coming out of the bathtub?” Because I know if I keep filling up the bathtub and nothing comes out, that bathtub’s going to overflow. But if it’s coming out really fast I can be putting a lot in and it doesn’t matter too much to the level of the bathtub. What’s not on this graph – what you don’t find unless you dig around through the numbers of the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Climate Change Commission of the United Nations – is the approximate rate at which carbon dioxide is coming out of the atmosphere today.

And by the way, I’ve asked a lot of experts – people in corporations who are really involved in this subject – whether they know approximately the rate at which carbon dioxide is coming out of the atmosphere relative to the rate at which it’s going in. And I rarely get more than 10% of the hands go up – although it’s getting to be more now because people are realizing this. The approximate answer is: It’s about one-half.

Today, the rate at which carbon dioxide is coming out of the atmosphere is approximately one-half the rate at which it’s going in. Or to put it differently, if every country in the world – including China, including India, including the United States – embraced the Kyoto Protocols tomorrow, carbon dioxide would grow in our atmosphere forever. Because all the Kyoto Protocols call for is a leveling of the rate of emissions – stopping the increase of the inflow. In other words, you stop filling up the tub faster and faster and you just hold the spigot open at that level. But since that level is twice the rate it’s coming out, guess what happens to the bathtub? It grows forever.

We need at least a fifty percent reduction in emissions globally. In fact, many scientists say we need a sixty or seventy percent reduction because the carbon sink’s so highly saturated. No one has a clue.

Now, when you consider this fact – and this is my reason for using this illustration – your time horizon has expanded. You now know a lot about the future, or at least you know one very important point about the future. This will change; because if it doesn’t change, no one has a clue what will happen. We haven’t seen climate change yet. Climate change will be something our kids see, and our kids’ kids, unless there’s radical change.

Now we’re thinking on a broader temporal horizon. And we didn’t do it through magic; we just did it by looking at the facts through the lens of stocks and flows. Stocks and flows, inflows, outflows, bathtubs are the tools that systems thinking uses to build up an appreciation for time. We’ve given ourselves a little glimpse into the future. Or, as the old Chinese adage goes, “If we don’t change the way we’re headed, we’re going to get where we’re going.”

So, these are three reasons we don’t see the interdependence. One, it’s unprecedented, and we have to appreciate that; we’ve never been here before. Secondly, seeing interdependence requires cultivating our capacities to see interdependence, which most of us have not done. And thirdly, it involves expanding our time horizon as well as our spatial horizon. And we don’t know how to do that either, but it can be done.

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