Systemic approaches to sustainable development offering guidance and hope

The recent 26th UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) was a sad reminder that we are making poor progress in our efforts to prevent climate change in line with the Paris Agreement. We are facing similar challenges related to other sustainability challenges such as realisation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Looking in retrospect at the weak progress made, and forward at the massive change needed, it seems clear that new approaches and capabilities are needed to deal with the sustainability challenges at hand.

How come it is so hard to mobilise the change so urgently needed? How can we better take on our sustainability challenges to create stronger and lasting impact? Could a combination of systemic approaches from fields such as organisational systems, design thinking, complexity theory, agile development, innovation management, and behavioural sciences guide us towards the understanding, solutions, and change needed?

“How can we start developing new mindsets, capabilities, and points of attraction to foster change beyond the strong forces of gravity towards more of the same?”

In the first half of this article, I will start by approaching sustainability challenges from a systemic and holistic perspective to help us understand the challenges in new ways, better navigate times of accelerating turbulence, and more effectively meet the needs for renewal and change:

• 1. Systems thinking and systemic design framing our challenges
• 2. Complexity theory helping us navigate in a VUCA world
• 3. Agile development and innovation management catalysing renewal

In the second half, I will look at some aspects of our human nature as bottlenecks of change as well as some organisational approaches and capabilities to move forward more effectively:

• 4. Behavioural sciences offering understanding and paths forward
• 5. Building new organisational, societal, and human capabilities

“On the horizon I see smarter organisations and societies that are more resilient and contribute stronger towards a sustainable future.”

1. Systems thinking and systemic design framing our challenges

Sustainability challenges are often complex, with many interconnected factors. To really understand the challenges, we need to identify and sort out all import factors, and ideally the root causes of what we want to address.

“Our ability to deliberately and effectively develop and contribute towards what we want to create and become as individuals and collectives is ultimately determined by our capacity to understand and navigate ourselves on the deepest level.”

The Systems Thinking Iceberg Model, popularised by systems scientist Peter Senge in his 1990 book The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, provides a highly relevant framework for looking at the broader picture of what has been, as well as what we want to create and become, in order to identify key factors and dependencies:

The model points at the need for looking underneath the visible events we typically react to so that we can understand and address the underlying causes.

For example, in the event of extreme weather events our immediate response will typically be reactive measures to relieve suffering, repair damage and so forth. Applying the iceberg model, we can identify other actions with more impact by understanding and addressing the underlying factors:

• Anticipate patterns and trends such as long-term climate changes and thereby be able to initiate proactive measures such as efforts to prevent damage from extreme weather events in the future.
• Design structures and systems such as energy-, transportation-, and city infrastructure preventing and mitigating climate change.
• Transform mental models such as how we relate to nature and what we value in life.

Eventually, the Iceberg Model will point towards the root causes of the challenge we are looking into, which in the context of sustainability challenges often will be related to our human nature (e.g., our aversion towards change, uncertainty, and risks briefly described in section 4) in combination with dysfunctional cultures and structures shaped by outdated beliefs and ideals (e.g., economic systems not considering external effect such as pollution, depletion of natural resources, and loss of biodiversity).

Taking the time to look deeper at challenges can generate new insights, but it can also become quite overwhelming and difficult to see how we can move forward.

The Systemic Design Framework launched by the British Design Council in May 2021 goes well in hand with the Iceberg Model and can guide us towards new insights, ideas, solutions, and actions. The framework consists of six principles for systemic design, four core roles of a design team, four overarching working practices, and a design process consisting of design activities inspired by the Double Diamon model in the context of orientation and vision setting, leadership and storytelling, connections and relationships, and the continued journey:

I find that this framework beautifully integrates stakeholder- and needs-oriented, explorative, and iterative design development practices with a broader, holistic, and strategic framing needed to address broader and complex issues involving many stakeholders and perspectives. For example, it provides a holistic yet actionable framework for how to work with mission-oriented oriented efforts which have become an increasingly popular approach to sustainability challenges (more about this further down).

2. Complexity theory helping us navigate in a VUCA world

While the sustainability challenges themselves tend to be complex – and typically involve lots of change, uncertainty, and risks – our surroundings are also becoming increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). On top of the sustainability challenges, factors such as accelerating technological development, demographic and sociographic shifts, and events such as the Covid-19 pandemic are pushing us into new VUCA territories where our reference frames as well as leadership ideals, qualities, and practices are pushed beyond their limits.

The Cynefin sensemaking framework developed by Dave Snowden is a useful tool to help us become aware of and navigate different levels of complexity. The most recent version of Cynefin looks as follows:

What the framework does in a great way is to help us become aware of and diagnose the nature of a situation or challenge and apply suitable approaches, practices, and constraints:

In situations where there are linear relationships between cause and effect, it is clear what is the best response in each situation. Hence, we can develop and apply best practices following straightforward steps of sensing, categorising, and responding to what is happening – and support our practices with fixed constraints such as pre-defined step-by-step procedures.

However, in line with the growing presence of VUCA conditions described above, the conditions, systems, and challenges are increasingly getting complicated, complex, and even chaotic. Within these domains the cause-effect relationships are less clear and with several possible responses to a situation (complicated), linearity does not exist so that outcomes cannot be predicted in advance and patterns need to be observed in retrospect (complex), and there may be no patterns at all (chaotic). This means we need to move from best practices to good practices where our responses are based on analysis rather than categorisation (complicated), emergent or exaptive practices based on probing (complex), and novel practices based on action (chaotic). Consequently, the fixed constraints that are useful in clear situations need to evolve into governing constraints (complicated), enabling constraints (complex), and even the absence of constraints (chaotic).

Summarised, the Cynefin framework helps us navigate different types of situations by understanding their nature and apply helpful practices. This is particularly important and valuable in situations where our surroundings, systems, and challenges are becoming increasingly turbulent and complex. And the implications are huge and reach far, not only in terms of leadership and decision-making, but also the larger picture of how we organise and manage different efforts and systems such as teams, organisations, and societies. How can we develop the mental, cultural, and structural capabilities needed to deal well with sustainability challenges and VUCA conditions in general?

VUCA conditions are not new to us, but they have not been evenly distributed in time and space. In the larger picture, it can be helpful to see what we can learn from humanity’s past experiences and practices such as indigenous wisdom traditions. A great example from such traditions is to make decisions in the best interest of people seven generations ahead, an enabling constraint promoting more long-term, holistic, and sustainable decision-making.

When it comes to acting smarter in today’s modern society, there are also more specific approaches and frameworks available to leaders, teams, organisations, and societies that are serious about their renewal and progress. In the next section I will introduce how agile development methods and practices from fields such as design thinking, software development, and innovation management can show us the way into new playing fields of leadership and management, and in the last two sections I will look at how behavioural sciences can shed light on important aspects of our human nature and how we can develop as individuals and collectives to better cope with our new realities and create sustainable progress.

“Innovation management is a great domain for holding together the bigger picture and building the capabilities needed to take on complex challenges and create sustainable progress.”

3. Agile development and innovation management catalysing renewal

Agile practices have guided development efforts into unknown territories and towards new insights and solutions for a long time and within many professional domains. In the field of design thinking, explorative and iterative development processes with key stakeholders and their needs at the centre help us create new and valuable insights and solutions within a wide range of contexts. The Double Diamond model, designed by the British Design Council in 2005, outlines a design process that embeds many key qualities of design thinking:

The model has become widely popular and has helped bring design thinking and tools such as customer journeys and speculative design to a broader audience. With the recent advancements towards the Systemic Design Framework introduced above, we are not only invited to adopt the mindsets and practices of designers but also take on broader and systemic challenges in a holistic and systematic way.

While agility to a large extent is implicit in design thinking, it has become very explicit in the field of software development. Software development comes from traditions of heavyweight development methods often referred to collectively as waterfall and has evolved towards lightweight methods and agile software development popularised in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

Agile development powered by frameworks such as Scrum has not only conquered software development but also brought agile approaches and practices into new fields such as innovation and general management, a development well described in the HBR article Embracing Agility (2016).

On the way, agile practices have been combined with other practices such as Lean and design thinking, resulting in a useful blend of development frameworks including Kanban, Lean development, SAFe, Lean Startup, as well as Lean and Agile UX.

Summarised, the wide range of agile development frameworks – and the mindsets, approaches, tools, and practices they offer – can make us better equipped to take on sustainability challenges and VUCA conditions at large – also in new areas such as societal development.

But how do we systematically build our capabilities to do so, beyond utilising great development frameworks? Innovation management provides an even broader and systemic perspective on how to strengthen our ability to create renewal and progress. A great reference point within innovation management is the standardisation work done by ISO, whereof the guiding standard ISO 56002:2019 on Innovation management system provides a great overview of what to consider:

Beyond pointing at key aspects of creating innovations and value, the innovation management system framework highlights a wide range of capabilities such as leadership qualities and management practices that are crucial to foster effective and systematic renewal and progress.

Combined with systems thinking, systemic approaches to development, a good understanding of VUCA and sensemaking on different complexity levels, as well as agile development practices, I believe that innovation management is a great domain for holding together the bigger picture and building the capabilities needed to take on complex challenges and create sustainable progress.

Having worked with innovation for more than two decades, I also know from experience that innovation and change management at large is easier said than done, and a few years ago I shared some perspectives on what’s so hard about innovation. Since then, I have deepened my understanding of the underlying barriers and drivers of innovation, in line with the iceberg model described above, and my main observation is that there is a strong gravity towards more of the same.

There are many factors that pull us towards more of the same, and existing frameworks such as structures, processes, principles, roles, and KPIs are the most visible ones and relatively easy to do something about as illustrated by the agile development frameworks above. Underneath the frameworks, however, there are behavioural and cultural factors that are even more important because they not only tend to be rigid and self-preserving but also shape our frameworks and influence how well they work.

In the next section we will investigate some aspect of our human nature that can help us understand why we often are drawn towards more of the same and point at a few things we can do to lean into exploration, creativity, learning, renewal, and progress.

4. Behavioural sciences offering understanding and paths forward

Think for a minute about which human mindsets and behaviours are good for renewal and change. What comes to your mind? Probably something along the lines of creativity, learning, courage, and drive. The sad thing is that we are hardwired and often trained for the opposite, and therefore uck in existing patterns unless we create favourable circumstances to break loose from them.

To me the most striking insight about our human nature is that we run on autopilot most of the time, following established thought and behaviour patterns based on past experiences. The good thing about this is that it is energy efficient. The bad thing is that it is a massive barrier to novel problem solving, deliberate decision making, true creativity, and renewal and change at large. This important understanding of the human brain was popularised by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Based on decades of research, Kahneman describes two modes of thought; System 1 which is fast, instinctive, and emotional, and System 2 which is slower, more deliberate, and logical:

This shows that our brains to a large extent are hard-wired for more of the same (System 1), and that it takes dedicated efforts to break out of established patters (System 2). Kahneman deepens our understanding of our minds through additional insights such as:

• Depletion effects limiting our System 2 capacity, pointing at the need for careful facilitation of efforts when System 2 is needed (such as creativity and complex decision-making).
• Heuristics and cognitive biases preventing us from being rational and creating new patterns (e.g., make shortcuts that saves energy and fits with our past experiences).

Cognitive biases constitute a huge topic offering many insights about our human nature. Cognitive biases are systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment and are often studied in psychology, sociology, and behavioural economics. A long list of cognitive biases have been identified, here is a great overview:

Being aware of our cognitive biases is an important first step to counter them, but in most cases, it takes deliberate facilitation and effort to reduce their effect.

I find the negativity bias (highlighted in the upper left corner) particularly important in the context of innovation and human development. It tells us that impressions of a negative nature have a greater effect on our psychological state and processes than neutral or positive impressions. This used to be a valuable trait when human evolution was all about staying alive by avoiding predators and enemies, while it is less useful when leaning into the uncertainty and risks often present in VUCA environments and innovation efforts. In short, it is a strong force of gravity towards more of the same by amplifying the uncertainty and risks associated with change – pushing us towards safe bets in line with existing thinking, behaviours, and solutions.

By being aware of the negativity bias, we can attempt to become more rational and open to change by dealing explicitly and systematically with factors such as uncertainty and risks, for example by applying portfolio perspectives and introducing agile methods. Another path is to counter the negativity effect by emphasising the positive aspects of situations as illustrated by the Magic 5:1 ratio for development of healthy and productive relationships. In the context of innovation, a similar approach is to emphasise our strengths, development opportunities, and what we want to create – a mission-oriented approach – rather than the problems, failures, and barriers of today.

“Missions offer a great approach to create new points of attraction that counter the existing forces of gravity towards more of the same – and thereby mobilise our willingness and ability to develop, learn, and change.”

At the end of the day, our ability to deliberately and effectively develop and contribute towards what we want to create and become as individuals and collectives is ultimately determined by our capacity to understand and navigate ourselves on the deepest level. Kahneman brought attention to the fact that most of the time we are driven by emotions and instincts, pointing towards the field of affective neuroscience. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. A key insight is that emotions are thought to be related to activity in brain areas that direct our attention, motivate our behaviour, and choose the significance of what is going on around us. Hence, our emotions can be seen as root causes of our thoughts and behaviours and therefore a key aspect of our human nature we need to understand, facilitate, and cultivate.

“We need to team up with our primal emotions and affective feelings.”

The term affective neuroscience was coined by Jaak Panksepp, who also identified seven biologically inherited primary (emotional) affective systems beautifully introduced in this this TEDx talk:

Applied to the field of innovation, I see striking relationships between the aversive emotions of fear and panic – tentatively triggering flight-fight-freeze responses when facing real or imagined risks and threats – and the concept of gravity towards more of the same. On the positive side, our rewarding emotions such as play and seeking can invite and support innovative states of exploration, creativity, learning, and change – in line with the concept of flow.

My personal take on this is that we need to team up with our primal emotions and affective feelings. First, by starting to observe them and respond more deliberately rather than instinctively, for example with the support of meditation, mindfulness, and reflection practices. Secondly, we can also nudge them through how we frame and facilitate activities, such as efforts to promote openness and trust and thereby better handle uncertainty and fear, or triggering care, seeking, and play through a motivating purpose and stimulating activities. Thirdly, we can also cultivate them through personal and team development, for example by recalibrating our perception as already illustrated by the Magic 5:1 ratio above.

“We can all learn to know ourselves better, find new ways of being at our best, and thereby unlock new levels of well-being, meaning, and contribution.”

In my opinion, this does not only apply to innovators and decision makers but to every person exposed to a need for change. Think about that for a minute, in relation to the sustainability challenges we are facing, pointing towards major shifts on a broad palette from everyday attitudes and habits such as consumption patterns to broader societal values and structures.

Based on these insights and perspectives, how can we move forward? How can we start developing new mindsets, capabilities, and points of attraction to foster change beyond the strong forces of gravity towards more of the same? We obviously need to work in parallel across all system levels, from individuals to the global community, as described more thoroughly in my later article The Great Reboot.

In the last section of this article my primary focus will be on the organisational level as our primary arena of collaboration, which I dig deeper into in my follow-up article about Breakthrough Organisations. On individual and team level I follow up by connecting the dots from Systems Thinking to Systems Feeling and -Healing and sharing ideas about boosting well-being and clarity in nature.

5. Building new organisational, societal, and human capabilities

In a previous article about organisational development I pointed towards mission-oriented approaches as a promising way forward towards renewal and progress:

“Missions are gaining interest and traction as vehicles for broader and deeper transformation efforts, partly thanks to economist Mariana Mazzucato and her work with governments to deal with some of the world’s biggest challenges. The mission-driven approach can be helpful in many ways, such as mobilising efforts across existing organisational structures and creating attraction around what we want to create rather than the problems at hand. This is not only relevant to societal transformation but also deeper renewal at large, and truly mission-driven organisations are more likely to be successful and tackle the turbulent times ahead.”

I believe mission-oriented approaches offer great value in many ways. Firstly, by taking on highly demanding challenges such as the moon shot, we become aware that we need to mobilise more broadly across professional and organisational boundaries. Secondly, by focusing on desired outcomes rather than existing problems and dysfunctionalities we can more easily frame the challenges in new and inspiring ways that better invite new perspectives and ideas. Thirdly, by working towards ambitious goals that stretch our minds and capabilities we invite a mindset and culture of exploration, innovation, and learning. Finally, research on goal setting shows that shows that more challenging goals lead to better performance when the circumstances are well designed.

Summarised, missions offer a great approach to create new points of attraction that counter the existing forces of gravity towards more of the same – and thereby mobilise our willingness and ability to develop, learn, and change.

Combined with the insights and frameworks introduced earlier in this article, I am hopeful that we can and will step up our efforts to take on the sustainability challenges and at the same time develop and renew ourselves. However, as I pointed at in the previous section with insights from behavioural sciences, a prerequisite for this to happen is that we also develop as humans – individually and collectively.

One important aspect of this is to become aware about our human nature and take that into consideration when further developing our leadership and management practices. Another important aspect is how we develop our general ability to collaborate and integrate knowledge when joining forces around sustainability challenges – be it across professions, organisations, industries, sectors, and other divides we may need to overcome. This is particularly important when the complexity and need to create new knowledge is high, and hence the need to develop deeper levels of cooperation and relationships as illustrated by this model:

Collective intelligence is a useful mindset and framework for development of collaboration- and knowledge integration capabilities. The broader concept of collective intelligence may seem a little abstract and theoretical, but there also exist more practical frameworks such as the Collective Intelligence model (CI model) that is based on research at the Stockholm School of Economics and powering the management consultancy I am part of, Influence.

“The CI model not only points at key qualities needed to unleash collective intelligence, but also provides a roadmap and practical steps to embark on the journey of becoming more intelligent as teams, organisations, and other systems.”

This framework points at four dimensions important to development of smarter teams and systems at large:

In short, the four capabilities that have been found important to our collective intelligence are:

• Representation: The ability to formulate an adequate shared picture of the task and its setting (corresponding to the first half of the double diamond model)
• Reflection: The ability to continuously learn (a key quality in VUCA conditions and agile practices)
• Relation: The ability to create an open social climate where members trust each other (in line with my previous insights related to our human nature)
• Integration: The ability to act as a coordinated unit based on supportive behaviour (preferably rooted in a deep understanding of our human nature and supportive practices).

The CI model not only points at key qualities needed to unleash collective intelligence, but also provides a roadmap and practical steps to embark on the journey of becoming more intelligent as teams, organisations, and other systems. Combined with practical efforts such as agile strategy development and needs-oriented innovation, collective intelligence offers new levels of renewal, progress, and positive impact. What I see on the horizon is not only smarter teams, but also smarter organisations and societies that are more resilient and contribute stronger towards a sustainable future.

And perhaps the best part of such journeys is that we can all learn to know ourselves better, find new ways of being at our best, and thereby unlock new levels of well-being, meaning, and contribution.

How do you feel about that?