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Systems Thinking &

Sustainability

22 Jan 2020 | WAYS OF WORKING

How shifting our mindsets can

help us create products and

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 services that do good by people,
the planet and businesses

Systems thinking is a powerful tool that helps us

beer navigate the complexity and delicate
balance of the socio-political and natural
ecosystems within which our businesses operate.
In order for any business to become resilient, to
withstand the shocks and stresses in their value
chain they must apply a systemic perspective.

Applying a systems thinking approach to

sustainability enables us to beer see and
understand the impacts of our business decisions
and avoid unintended consequences. It also enables
us to explore opportunities for innovation and design
our approaches for systems change. Be it incremental
changes or broader changes, we want to find a
practical way for us to be responsible for the impact
our work has on people and planet.

Systems thinking is a mindset that helps us to

untangle and work within the complexity of life on
Earth. It helps us to beer understand the impact
of our work on the world around us.

A system is a set of related

components that work together in a
particular environment to perform

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 whatever functions are required to
achieve the system’s objective -
Donella Meadows

To be responsible for what we create and how we

innovate, we need to do our best to understand how
the system works before we put new things into it.
But it can be diicult to predict all of the long term
impacts of every business decision and any new
product, service or innovation.

To be able to impact the system in a way that is

beneficial to people, the planet and businesses we
need to understand what key levers we need to push,
pull, add or remove, to encourage the system to work
in a dierent way or have a new purpose altogether.

Doing good in today’s world is hard.

Innovative or disruptive solutions can propel us into

the future. It can provide new and beer ways to do
things or allow us to do things we couldn’t before.
Most often opening a space for business growth and
investment opportunities along with it. When we think
about a single product or service we know that a
great amount of components need to be considered
to make it work. What is most often not considered
are the long term systemic impacts. For example, the
rise of electric scooters has facilitated micro-mobility
while simultaneously having an enormous impact on
road safety and even questionable impacts on the
environment. To create sustainable solutions that are

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 able to change over time, we need to consider the
systemic impacts of these potential solutions before
we invest in bringing new ideas to life. When systems
thinking is not part of the innovation process, then
solutions and business decisions could do more harm
than good.

Mapping relationships and

dependencies helps to understand
the implications of actions —
intended and otherwise. Systems
thinking catches unplanned and
secondary consequences before
they occur so they can be
managed. Source

It is far more diicult to amend systemic impacts

when funding and resources have already been
invested and a product or service has already been
rolled out. If we approach the process in a systemic
way from the beginning we can consider the
inevitable unforeseen impacts and create solutions
that are able to adapt and change based on feedback
over time. It can help us understand the impact of
scaling the solutions over time and how it will change
or interact with the system it ultimately operates
within.

Where does sustainability come in, how does it

relate to systems thinking?

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 Globally there is an agreement on what needs to be
done to build an equitable world both on a detailed
and broader level with the Sustainable Development
Goals By the United Nations. There are other models
like Donut Economics by Kate Raworth that help us
to visualise a dierent way of measuring ourselves
against socio-political, and natural systemic issues.

Thinking systemically about sustainability helps us to

see the connections between the dierent goals and
how we as businesses can contribute. It means we
can focus on where our core business lies while at the
same time be able to see the secondary impacts of
our work, increasing the positive impacts on the
system and avoiding unanticipated and undesirable
consequences on people and planet.

A mature understanding of
sustainability management
requires studies to adopt a
multidisciplinary systemic lens
capable of appreciating the
interconnectivity of economic,
political, social and ecological
issues across temporal and spatial
dimensions. -Journal of Cleaner
Production

We need to understand the systemic impact of our

work and apply systems thinking in practice

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 Siing in the systemic space can be challenging.
Thinking about the multitude of possible long and
short term systemic impacts of a new solution very
quickly gets overwhelming. And such feelings might
lead to an overcoming want to simply give up.

However the goal of systems thinking is not about

changing the system from the get-go but to become
more aware of the system itself. We want to be
“Enabling the system to become aware of itself.” Oo
Scharmer, Author of Theory U Senior Lecturer at M.I.T.
And with an increase of awareness in each business
function, we can begin to create change and
influence the system. This process begins by using
tools like mapping and visualisation. Helping those
involved to get on the same page, to have productive
discussions, see new opportunities and make beer
more informed decisions.

Picture description: using mapping to understand

understand impact and opportunity at scale

If you’d like to learn more about this process and

how to apply it to your business we have a

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 workshop that we’d love to tell you more about. The
workshop covers the basics of systems thinking
and unpacks why its perspective is beneficial to
making business decisions, especially from a
sustainable perspective. Get in touch!

Common questions about sustain-

ability and systems thinking

What is systems thinking in sustainability?

Sustainable systems thinking is a mindset that helps us to untangle and
work within the complexity of life on Earth. It helps us to beer
understand the impact of our work on the world around us and be
responsible for what we create and how we innovate.

What does systems thinking have to do with

a sustainable future?
Applying a systems thinking approach to sustainability enables us to
beer see and understand the impacts of our business decisions and
avoid unintended consequences. It also enables us to explore
opportunities for innovation and design our approaches for systems
change.

Author

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