Systems Thinking

I was lucky enough to attend the Sustainable Operations Summit in New York City recently.  It was held at the Hilton Hotel and the speakers were informative and very interesting.  I'm very glad that I went.  During one of the sessions the host (Andrew J. McKeon of Business Climate) alluded to the work done by Edwards Deming on systems theory.  This sent me off on my own cloud thinking about the relationship between business and the environment - on a systems level.  From the time that I was a child, I've been a very active outdoor person and intuitively understood (even when I was a little kid) that people are a part of nature.  Systems theory thinking wasn't necessary for me, I "got it" very early on.  While sitting there at the SOS 2012 Summit it occurred to me that the reason business has been slow to understand this basic relationship and the need for sustainable use of resources, is because they have a poor picture of the system.  The illusion they hold is that business and the environment are equal systems.  The thinking goes like this: they both exist free of each other, and can stand alone without influence to each other.  But, if you step away from the real economy/environment system and take a wide angle view,  you'll see the truth.   People are actually a subsystem of businesses.  Businesses are a subsystem of the economy.  The economy (small pink/purple dot) is a subsystem of the environment (large green dot).  Interestingly, we business folks (me included) tend to forget that the environment can exist without the economy, but the economy cannot exist without the environment.   We spend so much effort, time, and thought figuring out how to make our businesses work, and chasing the bottom line (which is really important) that we forget that it can only work within a healthy natural environment.  Embedded Sustainability is the way to bring these two systems back into proper alignment.   Do this and the whole system wins.   ###