Creating Sustainable Organizations Requires a Major Shift in Thinking
By Nick at 29 March, 2007, 12:20 pm
I just read a very stimulating post by Curt Rosengren about stimulating your mind. He brought alot interesting insight into the subject of sustainability.
If we can only start to think more systemically. What do I mean? Systems are integrated wholes whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. Think of the model - “Take, Make, Waste.” All organizations “take” in resources usually from the earth. They process (i.e. make) those resources into a product which is sold to the customer. That product eventually becomes “waste,” finding its way back to the earth, usually in the form of junk that you see on the streets or in landfills. Is it posssible for organizations to recycle it’s own products to eliminate this waste, and use it as resources instead of taking from the earth again.
This is hard to do because it is human nature to think in terms of lines instead of circles. From early childhood we were to break things up into its smaller parts and look at each individual component separately (i.e. analysis) and put it back together again later (i.e. synthesis). To be able to think more systemically will require a shifting focus from the parts to the whole, which implies a shifting from analytical thinking to contextual thinking.
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