Reading New Thoughts: What Do We Want the World to Be When We Grow Up? (Hiss, “Restoring the Planet”)

 Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

I have recently been reading “Restoring the Planet,” by Tony Hiss, and it has prompted some far more general thoughts about the endgame of successful climate change efforts.

Hiss book lays out, more or less, a global if North-America-centered effort to “set aside” 50% of all land from human use, to be achieved by 2050 (giving a nice slogan, “50 by ‘50”.)  He then discusses the ways in which people are using that effort to identify ecosystems and then as far as possible preserve or restore them, free from humanity’s touch. In other words, the areas being saved are then altered if necessary to create, as far as possible, functioning ecosystems having long-term viability without needing constant human intervention.

For example, one such effort seeks to “carve out” existing spaces where animals roam in fixed patterns and connect these via “corridors” that ensure that humans will not decimate the animals but still allow the animals sufficient range to be viable.  Another seeks to reserve remaining “wilderness” by establishing ownership of the property involved by entities dedicated to keeping it human-unaffected.

These efforts, and others, seem to me today to follow disparate ideas of what the endgame is and how to get there, only loosely coordinated if at all.  I believe that what I have seen can be more or less classified into five approaches, or movements:

1.       Sustainability

2.       Regeneration

3.       Human-designed ecologies

4.       No-human ecologies (more or less the approach described by Hiss)

5.       Human-included ecologies

Terms of Ecological Endearment

The approaches I have listed above overlap in some cases – a human-designed ecology may be aimed at creating a long-term sustainable ecosystem, or simply at regenerating an area to repair the damages of the recent past.  What matters, I think, is the goal of the approach, as an exclusive focus on one approach may or may not lead to the promised land of a low-carbon-emissions steady-state global set of ecosystems.  So it seems appropriate to examine each approach in that light.

Sustainability, it seems, it the most-known approach.  It explicitly requires setting up steady-state ecosystems, and only by inference those with low carbon emissions, since otherwise (one guesses) carbon-emission-induced climate change will make ecosystems unsustainable.  There is an unmistakable air of “whatever works” about the sustainability approach – it is thus entirely agnostic about regeneration and human-designed vs. human-included vs. no-human ecologies.

Regeneration, by contrast, seems to say that simply by restoring a previous state of an ecosystem will automagically result in a steady-state low-carbon-emissions environment, because the previous state of the ecosystem had this characteristic.  What makes this questionable is that one can’t walk through the same river twice: due to the Columbian Exchange, few ecosystems are the way they were 500 years ago, before carbon emissions started rising.

Human-designed ecologies is very much, I think, the province of the “new environmentalists”, those who think that we cannot restore ecosystems to a previous state and therefore we are forced to design new ecosystems, using existing tools, that will achieve a steady state.  Since this is a pragmatic approach, it leans toward leaving humans where they are and/or accommodating but constraining them as they continue expanding into the world’s ecosystems.  However, the question arises as to who decides what’s an appropriate end game – clearly, indigenous populations are not on the priority list of those who advocate human-designed ecologies.

No-human ecologies, by contrast, is the ideological leaning of the “old environmentalists”, who based on their experiences in the 1970s at the advent of the environmentalist movement tend to worry that humans, by and large, blight everything they touch.  I believe that this approach accords with the effort, in the US at least, to buy up everything possible not owned by the government (in Massachusetts, the aim is to acquire 80% of the land area) and turn it into places where humans go either not at all or only rarely.  Of course, the lands involved for the most part right now are the ones least subject to carbon pollution.  I would also guess that the main sticking point in the immediate future is places involved in mining, including those minerals involved in solar-power generation, not to mention installation of solar arrays in these areas.

I admit that I am fond of the human-included ecologies approach, because it seems to me more flexible than either the human-designed or no-human approaches.  That is, we make an exception to the no-humans approach where indigenous peoples have a strong track record of living sustainably on the land.  In many cases, these indigenous peoples have been strongly tainted by the modern economy and nation-state institutions, but there is clearly a case to be made that they still are the quickest way to restore a low-carbon-emissions steady state – not to mention the irony of visiting the worst consequences of a no-human-ecology approach on the worst sufferers from our previous “civilizing” emissions-hungry system.

In Which I Vote For All of the Above

I look at all of these approaches from the point of view of a climate-change person who is primarily concerned that we mitigate as fast as possible – that we reduce carbon emissions as fast as possible, with the ultimate steady state, if any, a secondary consideration for now.  Viewed in that light, I believe that each of these approaches is appropriate in a wide range of particular cases, and thus I am happy to “let a thousand flowers bloom” – i.e., encourage each of these movements.

At the same time, each time one of these movements comes into conflict with another, I think it is the right thing, not to commit to one side or another for the long term, but rather to establish rules of thumb for when a particular approach is most appropriate.  I would suggest that among these rules of thumb are:

·         When there are vested human interests in an area, pick the approach that impacts them least (but still minimizes carbon emissions)

·         Likewise, pick the approach that involves the quickest path to a healthy ecosystem (i.e., consider the needs of non-human animals and plants first)

·         Focus sustainability efforts on what seems irretrievably human-dominated – in other words, cities and their irreducible agricultural hinterland.  Since, in the foreseeable future, that comprises much more than half of humanity, but far less than a quarter of all of the land, that means both a human-designed and human-dominated ecology.

I would also bear in mind that each of these approaches, unlike mitigation, asks and tries to  answer the questions:  What do we want the world to be like if and when we cease our immature destruction of ecosystems and achieve a low-carbon-emissions world?  And, how can we ensure that we act maturely from now on and never again risk ourselves and our planet in this way?  For that reason, I would say that, while I would not prioritize any of these approaches over mitigation, they are every bit as important as adaptation to climate change’s effects.  If not more so.

Reading New Thoughts: Grinspoon’s Earth in Human Hands and Facing the Climate-Change-Driven Anthropocene Bottleneck

Disclaimer:  I am now retired, and am therefore no longer an expert on anything.  This blog post presents only my opinions, and anything in it should not be relied on.

In my mind, David Grinspoon’s “Earth In Human Hands” raises two issues of import as we try to take a long-term view of what to do about climate change:

1.        How best do we approach making the necessary political and cultural changes to tackle mitigation – what mix of business/market, national/international governmental, and individual strategies?

2.       For the even longer term, how do we tackle a “sustainable” economy and human-designed set of ecosystems?  Grinspoon claims that there are two opposing views on this – that of “eco-modernists” who say that we should design ecosystems based on our present setup, ameliorated to achieve sustainability, and those of “environmental purists” who advocate removal of humans from ecosystems completely.

First, a bit of context.  Grinspoon’s book is a broad summary of what “planetary science” (how planets work and evolve on a basic level, with our example leavened by those of Venus and Mars) has to say about Earth’s history and future.  His summary, more or less, is this:  (a) For the first time in Earth’s history, the whole planet is being altered consciously – by us – and therefore we have in the last few hundred years entered a whole new geological era called the Anthropocene; (b) That new era brings with it human-caused global warming and climate change, which form a threat to human existence, and therefore to the existence of Anthropocene-type “self-conscious” life forms on this planet, a threat that he calls the “Anthropocene bottleneck”; (c) it is likely that any other such planets with self-conscious life forms in the universe face the same Anthropocene bottleneck, and other possible threats to us pale in comparison, so that surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck is a good sign that humanity will survive for quite a while.

Tackling Mitigation

Grinspoon is very forceful in arguing that probably the only way to survive the Anthropocene bottleneck is through coordinated, pervasive global efforts:  in particular, new global institutions.  Translated, that means not “loose cannon” business/market nor individual nor even conflicting national efforts, but science-driven global governance, plus changes in cultural norms towards international cooperation.  Implicitly, I think, his model is that of the physics community he is familiar with:  one where key information, shared and tested by scientific means, informs strategies and reins in individual and institutional conflicts. 

If there is anything that history teaches us, it is that there is enormous resistance to the idea of global enforcement of anything.  I myself tend to believe that it represents one side of a two-sided conflict that plays out in any society – between those more inclined toward “hope” and those inclined toward “fear”, which in ordinary times plays out as battles between “liberals” and “conservatives.” 

Be that as it may, Grinspoon does not say there is not resistance to global enforcement.  He says, however, that global coordination, including global enforcement, is a prerequisite for surviving the Anthropocene bottleneck.  We cooperate and thereby effectively mitigate climate change, or we die.  And the rest of this century will likely be the acid test.

I don’t disagree with Grinspoon;  I just don’t think we know what degree of cooperation will be needed to deal with climate change in order to avoid facing the ultimate in global warming.   What he describes would be ideal; but we are very far from it now, as anyone watching CO2 rise over at Mauna Loa is well aware.   Rather, I think we can take his idea of scientifically-driven global mitigation as a metric and an “ideal” model, to identify key areas where we are falling down now by failing to react quickly, globally, and as part of a coherent strategy to scientific findings on the state of climate change and means of mitigation. 

Designing Sustainability

Sustainability and fighting climate change are not identical.  One of the concerns about fighting climate change is that while most steps toward sustainability are in line with the quickest path to the greatest mitigation, practically, some are not.  This is because, for example, farming almonds in California with less water than typical almond farming does indeed reduce the impact of climate-change-related water shortages, but also encourages consumption of water-greedy almonds.  I would argue, in that case, that the more direct path towards climate-change mitigation (discouraging almond growing while reducing water consumption in general) is better than the quicker path towards sustainability (focus on the water shortage).

This may seem arcane; but Grinspoon’s account of the fight between environmental traditionalists and eco-modernists suggests that the difference between climate-change-mitigation-first and sustainability-first is at least a major part of the disagreement between the two sides.  To put it another way, the traditionalists according to Grinspoon are advocating “no more people” ecosystems which effectively minimize carbon pollution, while the eco-modernists are advocating tinkering incrementally with the human-driven ecosystems that exist in order, apparently, to achieve long-term sustainability – thereby effectively putting sustainability at a higher priority than mitigation.

It may sound as if I am on the side of the traditionalists.  However, I am in fact on the side of whatever gets us to mitigation fastest – and here there is a glaring lack of mention in Grinspoon of a third alternative:  reverting to ecosystems with low-footprint human societies.  That can mean Native American, Lapp, Mongolian, or aborigine cultures, for example.  But it also means removing as far as possible the human impact exclusive of these cultures.

Let’s take a recent example:  the acquisition of Native Americans with conservationist aid of land around the Columbia River to enable restoration and sustainability (as far as can be managed with increasing temperatures) of salmon spawning.  This is a tradeoff:  In return for removal of almost all things exacerbating climate change, possibly including dams, the Native Americans get to restore their traditional culture as far as possible in toto.  They will be, as in their conceptions of themselves, stewards of the land. 

And this is not an isolated example (again, a recent book limns efforts all over the world to take the same strategy).  An examination of case studies shows that even in an impure form, it provides clear evidence of OVERALL negative impact on carbon pollution, while still providing “good enough” sustainability.  Nor do I see reflexive opposition from traditionalists on this one.

The real problem is that this approach is only going to be applicable to a minority of human habitats.  However, it does provide a track record, a constituency, and innovations useful for a far more aggressive approach towards mitigation than the one the eco-modernists appear to be reflexively taking.  In other words, it offers hope for an approach that uses human technology to design sustainable ecosystems, even in the face of climate changes, with the focus on the ecosystem first and the humans second.  The human technology can make the humans fit the ecosystem with accommodation for human present practice, not the other way around.

In summary, I would say that Grinspoon’s idea of casting how to deal with mitigation and sustainability as a debate between traditionalists and modernists misses the point.   With all the cooperation in the world, we still must push the envelope of mitigation now in order to have a better chance for sustainability in the long term.  The strategy should be pushed as far as possible toward mitigation-driven changes of today’s human ecosystems, but can be pushed toward what worked with humans in the past rather than positing an either/or humans/no-humans choice.

A Short Look Back at 2016

I have found very little in the last month and a half to add to previous posts.  CO2 continues its alarming rise, to what will in all likelihood be more than 406 ppm (yearly average) by end of year, and while global temperatures have ended their string of monthly records, we are still on course for a 1.2 degree C rise since 1850, about 0.3 degrees of it in the last 2 ½ years.  The big news in the Arctic (and Antarctic) is an unprecedented low in sea ice extent/area, plus record high temps in the Arctic in December – but that continues a smaller trend evident in most of the first half of 2016. 

Meanwhile, on the computing side, relatively little real-world innovation happened this year.  In-memory computing continued its steady rise in both performance and applicability, with smaller companies taking more of a lead as compared to 2015.  While blockchain technology and quantum computing made a big news splash early in the year, careful reading of “use cases” shows that real-world implementations of blockchain are thin on the ground or non-existent, as most companies try to figure out how best to make it work, while quantum computing is clearly far from real-world usefulness as of yet.

The big news in both areas, alas, is therefore the election of Donald Trump as President.  In the climate change area, as I predicted, he is proving to be an absolute disaster, with nominees for at least six posts that are climate change deniers with every incentive to make the American government a hindrance rather than a help in efforts to change “business as usual.” 

In the computing area, we see the spectacle of some large computing firms offering their services in public to Trump, an unprecedented move based on the calculation that while being seen as cooperative may not bring any benefits, failure to act in this way may cause serious problems for the firm.  Thus, we see Silicon Valley execs whose workforces are not at all enthused about Trump acting in meetings with him as if he offers new business opportunities, and IBM’s CEO announcing ways in which IBM technology can aid in achieving his presumed goals. 

It may seem odd to give such prominence to the personality of the President in assessing either climate change or the computing industry.  The fact is, however, that all of the moves I have cited are unprecedented, and derive from Trump’s personality.  To fail to consider this in assessing the likely long-run effects of the “new abnormal” in both the sustainability field and the computing industry is, imho, a failure to be an effective computer industry analyst.  And while no one likes a perpetually downbeat analyst, one that continually predicts rosy outcomes in this type of situation is simply not worth listening to.

I look back on 2016, and I see little that is permanent to celebrate – although the willingness of the media to begin to report on and accept climate change is, however temporary, worth noting.  I wish I could say that there is hope for better things in 2017; but as far as I can see, there isn’t.

SMR: A Miss Is As Good As Half A Mile

I am used to my favorite business magazine, Sloan Management Review, being light-years ahead in usefulness compared to many others, especially as regards the computing industry.  However, in reading several articles in a row in the Winter 2013 edition, I was struck by a strange discomfort.  After careful thought, I think I have identified the reason: it was the fact that the writers were identifying important things to consider, and completely ignoring other crucial things, without which the analysis was far less accurate and useful. They weren’t miles from reality – what they described really was there – but they seemed at least half a mile away.

So let me go through them, one by one.  I hope that at least my critique will help to close that half a mile in my mind or someone else’s.

Apple Did Not Introduce the Desktop Metaphor

The first article (“How to Use Analogies to Introduce New Ideas”) argues that using analogies effectively can be key to introducing new technologies to the market successfully, and that analogies that stress the familiar and analogies that stress “the novel” should be used appropriately, depending on the technology.

In making this argument, the authors use as their first example Apple’s use of the desktop metaphor for its Mac user interface.  While the article doesn’t explicitly say so, the implication is that its customers were unfamiliar with the desktop metaphor (with its files and folders) before the Mac.  That just ain’t so.  I was there.

I was a programmer in the late ‘70s when word processors first introduced the desktop metaphor.  And, in fact, it took a lot of hard arguing before the people trying to sell the metaphor realized that it was a bad idea to have file cabinets and files, instead of files nested within folders nested within folders.  But by the end of the ‘70s, the idea had taken, and was adopted by PC operating systems well before the Mac arrived in the late ‘80s. 

So why does this matter to the authors’ argument?  The point is that the reason the Mac succeeded was not because it used a familiar analogy to introduce a novel idea – it didn’t.  The novelty in the Mac operating system (although we should really include the Lisa in this account) was the use of object-oriented programming to rapidly produce an icon-based visual interface in which one operated by point and click, drag and drop.  Yes, analogies matter – the experience of the word processor folks shows that.  But, by the same evidence, the usefulness of the new technologies matters equally, whether an analogy is used to grease the skids or not. 

I worry that people will read this article and say, oh, all I need to do in introducing a new technology is make people comfortable with it, or attracted to it, by adding the right analogy.  On the contrary:  I would argue that whenever you do that, you should also work hard at ensuring that the technology is easy to use and useful.  Think about the introduction of the iPhone – little in the way of analogy, loads in the way of demonstration.  That was a novel technology to many – but once seen, very intuitive.  No analogy needed; but the hard work of making it usable – which, imho, was why Jobs succeeded where previous iterations of very similar technology failed – was critical to market success.

What the Future May Bring Is Not Just About Limits to Growth

The next article describes a new book making gloomy forecasts about the next 40 years based on system dynamics (I had a blog on this vs. agility a while back).  He argues that the future is primarily determined by the fact that we are overstretching our resources, and that therefore we will progressively be trying to grow more and more with less and less to grow with and thus with greater and greater starvation, pollution deaths, and other semi-inevitable results.

The problem with this analysis is that he seems to completely fail to understand the science and trends of climate change.  Climate change is not a matter of overstretched resources; it is a matter of a carbon-spewing system running on its own momentum and with much of the disasters ahead already baked in, unaffected by some systems-dynamics shrinkage of population and reduction of resource usage to sustainable levels.  To put it bluntly:  You could shrink the population to one billion right now and reduce some resource usage accordingly, but if you don’t over the next 17 years shrink use of oil, coal, and natural gas by 80-90% from today’s levels and keep it there for at least 200 years, you in all likelihood will still get huge losses of natural resources like farmland from sea-level rise and drought, and billions of deaths from starvation, not to mention the possibility of poisoned air related to ocean acidification.

Frankly, I find this omission distressing, because the book’s author (Randers) is apparently an expert on business and sustainable development, not to mention a professor of “climate strategy.”  If this is what the sustainability movement is typically aiming for, then it is in serious trouble – their goal is not even “sustainable”, since use of resources adequate for the capacity of the earth will not at all matter to businesses in the face of resources such as food shrinking well below the capacity of Earth in these halcyon days.  To put it another way:  first get carbon under control, then talk to me of overstretch.  Zero carbon emissions will at the very least reduce drastically our consumption not only of oil and coal but also related resources; reduction of population and/or generic resource use from 5 billion people equivalents to 1 billion will likely have relatively little effect on oil and coal usage – because that’s not the mole you’re trying to whack.

Randers’ approach, in my strongly held view, would take the sustainability movement down a side track at the moment we can least afford to lose focus.  Please, folks, think about this hard.

Sometimes, Multiple Sizes Do Not Fit All

The next article, “When One Size Does Not Fit All”, argues that companies much choose carefully in supply chain management between focusing on operational efficiency and operational responsiveness (to customers). Unfortunately, the example they use is Dell within the last five years, as it switches from its tried-and-true non-retail consumer-customer rapid-delivery PC model to servicing several types of customer (e.g., businesses) with several types of outlet (e.g., retail) and several types of product (e.g., servers).  The authors argue that the changeover has been a success, once Dell got its act together in developing different focus for different customers and embedding it in the supply chain.

Unfortunately for their story, I had an actual experience with Dell at about the time of the changeover, about three years ago, and my experience makes me question whether Dell really is an example of a success.  Specifically, I ordered a laptop in late November, assuming that (as Dell had always consistently done in the past), I would get it well before Christmas.  On the contrary:  I believe that I got it in early January.  I was in shock.  And yet, the authors’ account seems to imply that there was nothing wrong with Dell’s traditional model at the time of the changeover.

Another example is Dell’s approach to printers. The authors do not even mention printers as a factor in the consumer business, retail or otherwise.  And yet, for a long time, the Dell approach to printers has been an irritant to me.  As I remember, at least for part of the time, Dell only offered Dell inkjets with its Dell PCs and laptops.  That’s all very well, but inkjets need replacement cartridges frequently, and Dell would have you ordering its cartridges online, instead of letting you get them at all sorts of retail stores, like HP.  And when the delivery times start going south …

The point, to me, is that doing each supply chain right as it evolves is just as important as applying the right supply chain to the right customer.  And, I believe, PC World surveys of customer satisfaction bear me out: Dell’s satisfaction ratings in the consumer market, retail or online, have gone downhill and stayed there.  So the prime finding of the article, fit the right “size” of supply chain to the customer, appears to really miss the mark.  What the Dell example tells me is that you had better evolve each supply chain appropriately and keep it working well as the products offered proliferate, or it won’t matter how well your supply chains fit the customer.

Final Thoughts

I could pick nits on the next two articles (I really don’t think focusing on “likes” in Facebook is the most productive way to do brand management, and I seem to gather the idea of “cloud” outsourcing leaves out minor [sarcasm] factors like knowledge of the market among those tapped for these projects), but they seem much less like a frustrating experience in which the authors seem headed in the right direction, only to result in a big miss.  They seem to be off by a few feet, not half a mile.

So I guess my final thought is this.  Especially if you’re focusing on past history, it’s very important to get an inclusive global picture, and make sure your real-world examples don’t tell you anything different once you look at them closely.  There’s a lot of good work in the articles I cited, and yet I’m not convinced their overall impact, if taken seriously, will be positive at all.  Folks, let’s all up our games.  And caveat lector.

 

Agility and Sustainability: Complement or Clash?

It seems to me that both the concept of “agility” and the concept of “sustainability” have reached the point of real-world use where they will begin to intersect, especially in businesses, and where we will need to think about whether one should be subordinated to the other – because sustainability projects may detract from efforts towards agility, or agility efforts might detract from moves toward sustainability. Or, it may be that, fundamentally, the two complement each other, and can act in synergy. Since agility, at least, has proven its long-term worth in bottom-line results, and sustainability may turn out to be as necessary as the air we wish to breathe, the answer matters.

What follows is very far removed from daily reality. If business agility is fully achieved in a business – and we are so far from such a business that it is hard to say if it will ever exist – and if sustainability really takes over as a global business strategy and economic system – and we still do not know how such a system can function in the long term – then the relationship between the two will be a major issue. Still, some sort of answer would be helpful right now, so that as these two business and societal cultures lurch slowly into possible ubiquity, we can smooth the way for either/both. All we can do is paint with a broad brush; well, let’s get to it.

Setting the Stage: Similarities and Differences

Let’s start with business agility in its extreme form. Such a business (or society) is not focused on success as measured in money or power, but rather on changing rapidly and effectively. The reason this works is that all our institutions and thoughts bring us back to considering success – what we need from agility is a reward for constantly moving on from success. What grounds the agile business is constant negotiation with its customers and the environment as a whole, in which first one, then the other takes the lead in saying what to do next.

The mind shift described here is not as great as it sounds. In any given business, people want to learn, as long as it’s “safe”: it’s accepted by the people around you, people value you for being able to change as well as for specific accomplishments, you have some idea what to change to (i.e., the customer or end user gives you lots of suggestions), and the success rate of this type of thinking is high.

Such an approach has not only enormous positive side-effects on traditional but real measures of success – revenue, cost reduction, profit, customer satisfaction, power – but also great long-term psychic rewards – constant learning with constant positive feedback that what you are doing matters to other people as well as you, which can in some cases only end with the end of your life. In other words, once introduced, business agility can feed on itself – as long as it can get past the initial major mind and culture shift, which involves new metrics, new daily work routines, and baffling encounters with other parts of the company who are doing the same agility thing in a different way. But it all works out, because the work is more fun and because the new agile you starts treating those other parts of the company as customers.

Now let’s switch to the extreme form of sustainability. Wikipedia’s definition continually circles back to: preservation of a system’s ability to endure. More practically, this means: don’t put a system into such a state that it will break down. Usually, breakdown is done by scaling beyond the system’s ability to be patched, or destroying enough of the system’s infrastructure that it can no longer function. So, in my own definition, sustainability means creating a system that will not scale beyond a certain limit, forever, and will not destroy necessary infrastructure. All that we do, all the ways that we grow and change, are forever bounded by those limits – so a sustainable system is one in which not only are limits enforced, but the system itself encourages no violation of those limits. And yet, how do you do that without eventually banning all important change?

Well, strictly speaking, you can’t. And yet, you can indeed get so close to that, that we might well defer the problem until the end of the universe or thereabouts. The answer is equal parts “flight to the huge” and “flight to the virtual.” By that I mean, there are enough physical resources of certain types in the universe (like sunlight) that are beyond our capacity to exhaust for a very long time, and there is enough computer capacity even now that we can shift the things we do from physical to virtual for a very long time, and when we combine the two we see that most other limits that we are approaching can be handled for a huge amount of time by shifting them into the huge and virtual buckets as fast as we ramp up our systems.

The obvious example is putting carbon in the atmosphere. In a fairy tale world, we figure out how to capture and store sunlight with maximum effectiveness and level out its use, shifting from fossil fuels to handle our expanding use of energy as we increase in numbers and prosper. However, that’s not enough; we also need to wipe out that increase of energy usage. And so, we shift from physical to virtual, changing the content of our physical machines to include greater and greater amounts of software, avoiding the need for physical machines by accomplishing much of their tasks by software. This is not about making the physical worker useless before an omnipotent machine; this is about 6 billion people with 6 billion “virtual machines” doing more than what 5 billion people with 1 billion “virtual machines” were doing before, but with the same number of real machines and the same energy usage, ad infinitum. That’s “close enough” sustainability: you are not trapped in a pond, circling the same shores forever, but always flowing down a river that appears to be forever widening and changing, with enormous shores on either side and a riverbed that never deepens.

And now we can see the similarities and the differences between this type of sustainability and this type of agility. Here are the similarities:

• Both are all-encompassing mind sets, cultures, and processes that are clearly quite different from the ones we have now.

• Both are likely to be more effective – help us to survive more, help us to be better off physically and psychologically – than what we are doing today, in the long term.

• Both allow for growth and change – the growth and change that has brought us this far.

But, here are the differences:

• Agility is a more positive message: there’s always something to learn, something better to do; while sustainability is a more negative message: there are limits, and life is about staying within those limits.

• Agility is open and more uncertain, you assume that there will always be new things to do, but you have no idea what they are; sustainability is closed and more certain, as the things that matter are avoiding breakdowns, which are typically bounded problems that are physical, definable, and measurable.

• Fundamentally, agility focuses on changing and ignores survivability, and so improves your chance to survive; sustainability limits change in the name of survival, and who knows what that does to your ability to grow and change?

In other words, agility and sustainability can be seen as rivals for the better business, culture, and society of the future, which can all too easily either undercut the other in their competition for being the One True Way, or fight so fiercely that neither is achieved. And, as I noted in the introduction, either kind of “clash” outcome will eventually matter a lot.

Initial Thoughts on Synergy

It seems to me that there are two approaches that could ensure that, despite this, both agility and sustainability can thrive, and perhaps even reinforce each other. I call them the tactical and the strategic.

The tactical approach tries to manage combining agility and sustainability on a case-by-case basis. This means, for example, setting the boundaries of sustainability very clearly, so that they are intuitive for all, for the business as well as the society, and enforcing them strongly when clearly violated, but allowing endless agility within those boundaries. Carbon pricing is an example of the tactical approach: if effectively administered, it constantly sets clear monetary boundaries on carbon use, within a sustainable carbon yearly limit. Do that, says the tactical approach, and then let the business be as agile as it wishes.

The strategic approach, by contrast, seeks to create an integrated mindset combining agility and sustainability. One way to do this that I view as feasible is to get people used to the idea that trying to do the impossible is not the most effective way of doing things. As I have previously written, “working smarter, not harder” comes down to “instead of trying the impossible, be smart and focus your (in this case, change ideas) on things that are possible.” Knowing short-term and long-term limits becomes an essential part of the really agile business, because it allows people to increase the number of new ideas that are really good ones. But then, the strategic approach involves yet a third mind shift, to trying to work smarter instead of harder and seeing limits as positive idea-producers; how many mind shifts can we do, anyway?

Summing Up

My overall conclusion is brief: Tentatively, I lean towards taking a strategic approach to melding agility and sustainability, and applying it wherever frictions between the two crop up; but my main conclusion is that we had better start thinking more about tactical and strategic approaches, and how to do them, right now. It may be that the successes of agility will lead to a mindset that treats sustainability as yet another source of new ideas, and so we muddle through to survival; but I wouldn’t count on it. Much better to be proactive even when agility doesn’t call for it, and think about how to combine carbon metrics and agility metrics. In the meanwhile, I’ll continue preaching agility – because it’s fun – and keeping a wary eye on sustainability – because we may need it sooner than we think.

That’s as far as I can get. Ideas, anyone?