The fundamental role of ecological intelligence in creating resilient business practice

This is a conceptual paper that is informed by the ideas and outcomes of two EPSRC funded projects undertaken in the areas of sustainable innovation, organizational change and ecological literacy from 2005 to 2008. This transdisciplinary landscape offers up interesting questions concerning the make-up of sustainable practice in organizations: its limits and the opportunities that can arise for creating resilient business thinking and outcomes. The first project Design Dialogues [1] addressed the integration of sustainability across the scale of business practice, particularly that found in the innovation of new products and services. A number of dialogues were undertaken with expert academics and practitioners in the field of sustainability to understand what is important in constructing meaningful responses to sustainability. There was a surprising level of agreement on what constituted core sustainability values and motivations: particularly the importance of individual value-systems in driving sustainability within organizational activities. An innovation approach was also highlighted as important in challenging the value-system of business; as De Bono suggests [2], innovation should challenge what people know and should explore the different dimensions of performance at the organisational level [3]. The project interviewed six leaders of sustainability-oriented organizations about their thinking and practice. The findings indicated that innovation for sustainability embraces a sustainability culture within which alternative futures and different outputs can be visualized. In so doing the project evolved a methodology for innovation for sustainability that focused on two key paths [4]: the first a cultural pathway to provoke transformations at different scales: individuals, teams, leaders, organizations etc.; its aim to build new thinking rather than implementing sustainability as an add-on to existing business ways of seeing and doing. One of its elements is a framework that enables decision making to be driven through challenging existing assumptions and habits, fostering new connections and developing new modes of operations (figure 1). The second, an operations pathway, finds new opportunities to explore relationships in the value chain – the intra and inter-relations in the business cycle through time - to generate future scenarios which support holistic sustainable solutions at different scales from attributes and products to services and systems (figure 2). The second EPSRC project Exploring ecoliteracy and its relevance in realizing far-reaching sustainable innovation [5] overlapped with the first project and explored different but connected issues. Ecoliteracy combines the sciences of systems and ecology in drawing together elements required to foster learning processes toward a deep appreciation of nature and our role in it. It is concerned with understanding the organising principles of ecosystems and the potential of these in constructing sustainable human societies [6] The research explored design in a context of ecological thinking and investigated the opportunities for design beyond that which is currently regarded as ecodesign through looking at whole thinking in a number of key disciplines such as industrial ecology [7], sustainable pedagogy [8], environmental behaviour [9] complexity [10], cognitive ergonomics [11] and organizational learning [12]. A key message from these projects is that creating sustainability (rather than reducing unsustainability) [13] must embrace the ecological domain. What emerged from the dialogues in both projects, and what a trans-disciplinary exploration also showed, was that limits to organizational change are bounded by the limits of the business system. It seems likely that to apply ideas of sustainability as add-on to current practice does not produce a longevity of more sustainable practice; there is not scope for resilient futures to grow in this mode of thinking as the limits of current system priorities [the economic boundaries] challenge sustainable operations at their core. Economic boundaries are man-made ones; ecological boundaries are not. The ‘real-world’ is one of depleting natural resource stocks: peal oil and peak minerals and ores [14]. Business models that do not acknowledge the scale of this resource decline have limited potential to navigate the changing system boundary. There is a need to explore the many ways in which ecological intelligence can be deeply understood, integrated and imagined to inform the growth of resilient societal cultures and operations, including those of the business world. It is possible that design can help vision such change through the creation of new types of products, services, systems and operations that help to deliver sustainability.