Is systems thinking helpful for strategic sustainable development? Yes, on one condition!

Do you want to improve on bottom lines from stepwise moves towards full scale sustainability? Well, join the FSSD Global. Why? Because that’s what we do. By applying the one and only Operative system that is developed for this purpose.

* The Operative system is a structure that covers everything needed at the systemic level (the whole world), systematic level (stepwise processes) and strategic level (improved ROI from first step). This is different from all App’s out there, that focus on various details that may be relevant to put into the Operative System’s structure if the topic in question calls for it. For instance UN SDGs, Circular Economy or Science based Targets. This brakethrough in sustainability science revolves around a key element, robust Boundary Conditions for sustainable re-design.

* Boundary conditions are principles for (re)design of goals in complex systems. For instance, the generic boundary conditions for sustainability (applying to all sustainable goals). This appeal to strategic learning by doing, feels psychologically inclusive rather than prescriptive, invites communities of regions and value chains to co-create attractive scenarios within the shared boundary conditions, and is easier than any alternative. Beginning with robust overviews have that effect. It is more fun too.

*The size of a system is irrelevant when it comes to the challenge of complexity. An atom is a cosmos of inter-relationships between matter and energy, too much to consider if you don’t know what you want. So, a physicist needs to know the boundary conditions of what he or she wants with the atom. Merge it with another atom? Split it? Study it for the sake of open-ended learning? System boundaries are the definition of purpose.

*You are already a genius. Winning in chess, Curing Cancer, Curing Un-unsustainability and having a purpose with atoms, all by boundary conditions, does this sound like tasks for experts? Well, the good news is that people in general were born geniuses when it comes to managing complex systems by boundary conditions and learning about systems that way. People do this in their everyday lives, but not for sustainable development. Why? Because the boundary conditions of this particular task are newly developed.

* People are, on good grounds, confused by the synonyms ‘Systems Thinking’, ‘Systemic’, ‘System Dynamics’, ‘Holistic’. But what does it mean to think “holistically” of everything in a complex system? Well, nobody can do that. Nor is it needed. Because boundary conditions for your purpose help you systematically select the data from the system you need for your purpose.

*So, system bundaries tell you what to consider in the system, for your mission, to avoid seeking knowledge while drowning in information. Simple as that.

*Without this, strategic planning towards complex goals in complex systems is not difficult, it is impossible. Without boundary conditions, you will drown in data and are bound to solve one problem by inventing another, and running into unforeseeable costly suboptimizations and blind alleys on the way.

*There is only one set of robust and generic Boundary Conditions for Sustainability, being the same for all sustainable goals. They are the key elements of the Operative System to systematically (processes) and strategically (improving on bottom lines from upfront) to get there, the Operative system of the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development.

*When you have used the FSSD in a first attempt of a systematic step-wise plan towards your specific goal, modelled to comply with the boundary conditions, it is easy to choose between, and inform, the App’s that may assist your journey. So, the FSSD Operative System does not compete with, but increase the value of, all App’s – UN SDGs, Circular Economy, Planetary Boundaries, Causal Loop diagrams, Fuzzy logics, Doughnut, Science based targets etcetera – just like Operative systems in the IT World do.

*To understand this is the most basic element of strategic thinking, yet the most commonly and dangerously missed when it comes to Sustainable Development. This is not the least when it comes to Bottom Lines and Returns on Investments. If you mean well about sustainability, but don’t have the skills, you will loose money and other resources on the way. The greatest waste of all.

The Background, and Breakthroughs of exploration, more in detail:

1. ‘Systems Thinking’, ‘Systemic’, ‘System Dynamics’ and ‘Holistic’. These synonyms generally refer to complex systems viewed as dynamic multifactor interdependencies of different aspects within a certain domain, be it atoms, the human body, solar systems, a game like chess or the ecosystems of Nature. The aspects that are interdependently related in the respective systems are expressed in different dimensions. For instance, volumes, weights, concentrations, toxicity levels, money. Or mathematically when feedback loops between the factors are developed into differential equations. The latter is used to simulate various outcomes as factors are changed. One factor may be doubled, for instance production volumes of an industrial product, whereby the prize per item tends to drop around 20%. Which may increase sales, in turn negatively or positively influencing something else in another feed-back loop. There may also be delay mechanisms of responses to various impacts and stimuli when the factors are in play for instance when concentrations of toxins go up until they reach thresholds for destruction. But how many can consider all these things at the same time? Nobody.

The key term for managing complex goals in complex systems, for instance reaching the four boundary conditions of checkmate in chess, is “boundary conditions”. Every one of the myriad scenarious on the chessboard, that comply with those boundary conditions, means checkmate. They make it possible to systematically select the stuff you need for your mission in the system, in this case determining strategic moves in context of each situation on the chess board. So, to become a master strategist in chess, curing of cancer or…curing of unsustainability, you need not know everything about the respective systems. But you do need to be crystal clear about your specific purpose, the boundary conditions for winning. For example, the two boundary conditions of cancer cure (kill the last cancer stem cell, but don’t kill the patient), or the eight of strategic sustainable development (find them under FSSD on Google, through AI engines or read previous reflections).

2. The size of the system is irrelevant when it comes to the challenge of its complexity, only human comprehension is the limit. An atom is a cosmos of relationships between matter and energy. So, if you are a physicist wanting to study it, you need to know what you want with it. Split it? Combine it with another atom into a molecule? Fuse its nucleus with that of another atom? Discover a new elementary particle or explaining this or that quality of the atom? The boundary conditions of your mission determine what you need to know about the system ‘atom’, until you can design your approach. ‘Purpose as system boundaries’.

3. You are already a genius on this. Winning in chess, Curing Cancer, Curing un-unsustainability or Studying atoms, all sound like tasks for experts? Well, the good news is that people in general were born geniuses when it comes to managing complex systems by boundary conditions and learning about systems that way.

4. We apply this quality of humans for our everyday living. Say that you have got a new job far away from where you live now, in a region where you have never been. So, you need to move to a new home, a very complex task with a huge to-do-list of things you need to put under each of the relevant boundary conditions until you have made it. In this case the boundary conditions are: You must…(i) be able to afford the new living, (ii) make it in time for everyday commuting, (iii) find it adapted to basic life requirements of that geographic environment (iv) manage your specific family demands. There are huge and personally specific possibilities under each of the generic boundary conditions, but you model all of these specifics until you can select between, perhaps, only a few options of homes that meet all boundary conditions together. A relatively more expensive living could perhaps lead to higher salary demands, or cutting down on something. An example that implies modelling within the boundary conditions. People may regret choices of optional details within the boundary conditions, for instance the wallpaper in a room, but generally don’t flunk on the generic boundary conditions. So, it is very rare that someone would end up in a leaking castle ruin not affordable for more than a week and located 1000 miles away from the new job, contemplating how it could all go so wrong.

Is this relevant for our topic? Well, now we all need to move into a new sustainably designed ‘house’ (eco- in the term ecosystem means “house”), with an adequately designed economy for the household (economy means “householding”). So, when it comes to or current life-threatening mismanagement of our common global “house” with its “householding”, why don’t we apply the qualities we are otherwise constituted to manage so eloquently?

5. Advise to teachers and moderators of FSSD workshops. Explain the need for system boundaries first, for instance the house-move example above, or chess or cancer cure. When teachers of the FSSD move directly to the generic boundary conditions of sustainability, the above opportunity of clarity gets lost. It is about not skipping the logic flow behind the need for Boundary Conditions of Complex Goals in Complex Systems until the ones for Sustainability are presented. Only when that logic is understood and shared with an audience, by use of various examples, the boundary conditions for sustainability are called for as a “cliff-hanger”. This is a nice pedagogial technique, until the boundary conditions for sustainability are explained.

6. Two common misunderstandings of Apps for sustainable development. In the statement “yes, yes, there are many models…” lurks a subtext of two superficial but not uncommon and flawed assumptions:

(i) Is an Operative system really better than any of its App’s? Of course not, these two different things relate to each other in a firm and absolute way. Which should be pointed out right away; The FSSDs Operative system ‘ABCD in the Funnel’ is unique, per design, to put all applications for decision support in context. It tells what aspects of strategic approaches to full scale sustainability that are covered by a certain App and what aspects are not in that App. Thus, increasing the respective values of App’s for any tailor-made plan of sustainable development.

(ii) Is the choice of App’s up to the individual planner’s intuition or personal liking? It would be intellectually lax, just as crazy as choosing between, for example, the Android Operatative system on the one hand, and some app for GPS navigation on the other.

7. Choosing between the App’s occur once you have set your tailormade ABCD plan. The choices you make between different apps are of great importance since all well-thought-through apps are developed for different tasks in sustainable development. E.g. Indicators (measurement and monitoring), LCA (life cycle assessment of goods and services), Modelling (multidimensional analyses of goals and objectives), Simulation (predictive calculations of goals and objectives), ISO14001 (management/administration), Footprinting (communication), Circular economy (Economy of recycling), UN sustainability goals (17 attractive stories painting different angles of an attractive sustainable civilisation), etc. etc. So, there are many app’s around. But how does that work for you if there is no Operating System to bring them into a cohesive context for your planning, one without big gaps? The answer is that it doesn’t. Without the Operative system, we get Piecemeal measures that keep solving one problem in the system while inventing more problems elsewhere and/or that cannot be scaled up within the system boundaries.

8. No other system has been developed for this specific and overarching strategic purpose. And it is not in the interest of anyone that App’s are used for purposes they are not designed for. But the Operative System helps strategists to pick the Apps needed for a perfect tailormade fit.

9. How did the breakthrough of the boundary conditions occur? Below follows the logic behind thought processes and the breakthroughs in the research behind what eventually became the unique Operating System with its equally unique sustainability boundary conditions for (re)design.

i. Boundary Conditions robust for (re)design. If you want to systematically approach complex goals in complex systems – e.g. winning chess games, curing cancer, or curing un-sustainability – then you are referred to boundary conditions for the goals you want to achieve. At the detailed level, all such goals can look in many ways , where details are modelled to comply with the boundary conditions together. The boundary conditions do not change as planning unfolds into reality, as little as the boundary conditions for checkmate or cancer cure change according to how the game or the patient’s clinical journey develop.

ii. 5 necessary criteria for boundary conditions. In order for boundary conditions of any complex goal in any complex system to be robustly generic, they must be Necessary (but no more than that, because then we include values that are arguable), Sufficient (because otherwise we have forgotten some area that also needs to be covered), General (so that we can model multidimensionally and collaborate across sectors and disciplines regardless of mission and scale), Concrete (so that they really become a guide for the chess moves, the cancer cure or the un-sustainability cure) and Mutually exclusive (so that they do not overlap thus creating ambiguities and monitoring difficulties).

iii. How did we find the boundary conditions for sustainable (re)design? The solution was, a little counterintuitive perhaps, logical as well as psychological: Today’s un-sustainability disease, with its myriad symptoms, is due to damage from human activity. Thus, it becomes both logical, and indeed also more psychological, to search for various basic mechanisms of destruction of the biosphere’s social and ecological systems. Again, in this case, it is not about exploration of aspects of the systems as such, only basic mechanisms for their destruction. So that the myriad sustainability-related damages in these two systems can be explained upstream by a few basic design-mechanisms of destruction. And then putting a “not” in front of these basic mechanisms. Boundary conditions for (re)design.

iv. Negative formats of boundary conditions are logical and more appealing. This is not only logical, but also psychological: Having the negation “not” embedded in boundary conditions for the modelling of attractive sustainable futures may sound negative but works psychologically the other way around. First, it opens doors to innovation. “You can come up with any solutions you like, for as long as they don’t violate the boundary conditions.” Which also leans towards a flat model of leadership. This contrasts to a positive formulation: “You are allowed to do this and that”. This is a prescriptive chain of command, allowing you to do what you are told. Which leans towards a top-down-control leadership.

v. How to move from the systemic to the specific topic. For the individual topic, for instance an organization, the translation from the boundary conditions of civilization is now simple to understand. In the future, imagine an organizational goal (A), where the organization does not contribute to violations of the civilization’s boundary conditions at any scale. Which is good to know both for how to get rid of your contributions to un-sustainability, and your innovations to help others do the same on more and more sustainability driven markets (the Funnel).

vi. More detailed scenarios within the boundary conditions. Within the boundary conditions, different possible scenarios are now being modelled and modified as the game unfolds, that is, details within the boundary conditions are evaluated to make the goals not only sustainable but attractive and worth longing for as well.

vii. The pedagogy of boundary conditions as a cliffhanger. Now it is time to explain why the boundary conditions within the FSSD’s ‘ABCD in the Funnel’ operating system are the only ones developed to meet the five criteria of 5 (ii above), so that goals and processes to get there can be systemic (boundary conditions evolved from the entire civilization of the entire biosphere) systematic (ABCD is the basics of ‘step by step towards meeting goals within the boundary conditions’) and strategic (each step of the journey towards the goal, under D of the ABCD, paves the way technically and economically for the next in the funnel, with growing opportunities for ROI and good finances). And, again, it has proven helpful to capture the interest of sustainability experts by analogies of chess, cancer treatment, moving to a new house, or other complex tasks in complex systems. An interest up to the cliff-hanger is effectively mobilized in this way.

viii. Uniqueness demonstrated together with pioneers. We have not come across any other concept that has been as intensively developed together with pioneers behind various “Apps” out there. It started as a UNEP-initiated project many years ago, where pioneers of tools and concepts where convening in Paris to explore their respective relationships with the Operative system of FSSD. And has developed significantly since then, for instance regarding LCA (Yale University), ISO14001 (British Standard Institute), Ecological Footprints (Wackernagel), Factor 4 (von Weiszäcker), Factor 10 (Bio Schmidt Bleek), Planetary Boundaries (Johan Rockström) etc. The FSSD has not snowed in on its own stuff but, on the contrary, taken other people’s concepts very seriously together with their respective Pioneers, all for bilateral improvements of the Operative systems as well as the App’s.

ix. ‘ABCD in the Funnel’, the Operative system based on the Boundary Conditions. It is only now it follows why the Operating System FSSD really works as an Operating System. After a certain organization has established and modelled a general and attractive goal within the unique boundary conditions (A), it is easier to discover what the current challenges and strengths are in this context (B), which in turn triggers a laundry list of possible measures (C) after which the work of prioritizing among the measures begins to shape a step-by-step plan (D). This happes iteratively, as the game unfolds.

x. From this operational overview, you can now choose different tools to support the specific ‘ABCD in the Funnel’ process. The overriding instruction is to cross-read your ABCD plan against any of the apps there may be an interest in, to see if it may help you fill in something of interest under A, B, C or D, respectively. The rhetoric question is: “Would we like to add/amend/change any of the aspects under A, B, C or D with the help of LCA, Modelling, Simulation, Circular Economy, UN Sustainable Development Goals, Footprinting etc …

Concluding summary:

People are not rarely, on good grounds, confused by the synonyms ‘Systems Thinking’, ‘Systemic’, ‘System Dynamics’. ‘Holistic’ thinking sounds friendlier to some, and flakier to others, but is used as a synonym for all. But what does it mean to think “holistically” of everything in a complex system? Well, nobody can do that. Nor is it needed!

To be a master strategist in chess, curing of cancer or curing of unsustainability, you need not know everything about the respective complex systems. But you do need to know enough for your particular purpose, mission, in the system. It serves as a lens through which you pick what you cannot do without for your (well-defined) purpose. Simple as that.

Therefore, your definition of purpose, in crystal clear design terms of boundary conditions, is the key. Since nobody can look into the future at any level of detail, such design definitions of strategic goals in complex systems should only occur by basic principles of successfully designed goals, Boundary Conditions. Without this, strategic planning towards complex goals in complex systems is not difficult, it is impossible. You are then bound to solve one problem by inventing another, running into costly blind alleys, or picking “solutions” with insufficiently low grades of scalability. So, any scenario of details within robust boundary conditions, means “winning” that is, fulfils your goal setting. Whereas any scenario outside of the robust boundary conditions does not. Be it a chess player reaching the four boundary conditions of checkmate which can look in myriad different ways. Or be it a strategic cancer clinician reaching boundary conditions of cancer-cure ((i) killing the last cancer stem cell (ii) without killing the patient). Reaching scenarios that meets the boundary conditions of a complex goal is a digital thing, ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Informing complex missions within complex systems by boundary conditions for successful outcomes of missions, opens for stimulating “out-of-the-box” thinking. You are then not a slave of “improving” what is already there but can creatively produce truly new innovations towards attractive goal(s). However, being crystal clear about the boundary conditions should not include attempts to tampering with the myriad possible scenario details within such boundary conditions. We leave this with our clients, who only get support to reach their dreamed-of contents within the boundary conditions. This appeals to strategic learning by doing, feels psychologically inclusive rather than prescriptive, invites communities of regions and value chains to co-create attractive scenarios within the boundary conditions, and is easier. It is more fun too.

Don’t wait, just get on with through FSSD Global to learning by doing!