Climate change – humanity is paralysed
Posted in: Humanity Tags: climate change, context, Continuity, Humanity, livability system, retrograde, unintended consequence
Sunspots, man made, sunspots, man made, believe it is ‘true’, believe it is not ‘true’, etc, gosh and this level of discussion helps us how?
For years humanity has been flummoxed by its own lack of ability to – once and for all – figure out what is happening with climate change. It is heating up, it is cooling down, it is in the sunspots stupid, it is man made idiot, it is caused by changes in the Golf Stream [cooling message for Northern Europe] and others etc.
About 30+ years the High School Certificate equivalents around the world have had versions of this question. I had one for mine in the early 80s. At that time it was about greenhouse gases.
What I cannot quite figure out is why do we argue about it? We know that if we do not act in favor of what ever we can do to improve our livability systems, then we’re for sure having a negative impact, even if just on the air we breathe, the amount of rubbish we have to deal with, the cost of transporting endangered liquid like water or the amount of fish available in the oceans. I know these are matters, which are caused by other things besides the climate change but the results are on the same side of the equation.
Err on the side of action for improved air [if nothing more], when politics, science and human skepticism cannot come to an agreement. A classic flame war! Not a great one to bargain with and too big to solve it by us all spending hours in weeding our veggie gardens. Wouldn’t it be nice though if the politics around this matter got real. I do not hear a lot of serious conversation in Oz about this, meaning open transparent involved conversation, not just politicians. It seems that in Finland people are seriously discussing what and how they could cut from their consumption, perhaps that summer cottage, which does not get used?
I just don’t think the solution is retrograde. What I mean by that is a solution, which looks backwards and seeks some rosy image of yesteryear. We live in a different context now, there are more people, our cities look different. A solution is needed, which consists of the best of the better parts available and builds towards a good life. A fabulous unintended consequence might be that we get happier not chasing stuff 
and another one would be that we become more effective and healthy in how we feed ourselves….. but how will our economies cope? Well that’s just it, the biggie, it needs a change too if we are to be real about the solutions, change in the values and change in the realities of what and how we sell/buy.
Continuity vs. sustainability
Posted in: Humanity, Innovation Tags: champions, climate change, Continuity, heretics, navel gazing, repeatability, sustainability
Reinventing to survive
2007 seems to be the year that those who spent years on sustainability [environmental] and seemed to get very little public attention have finally been given a small thank you for their efforts. The spotlight is on climate change.
To sustain a business over changes in people inside and outside the organization, cultures, visions, technologies, competitive moves is not currently included in the ‘sustainability’ discussion but is part of the bigger picture. The business world talks about business continuity. What is not often obvious in the articles about business continuity is how companies go about that. The books “Good to Great” and “Built to Last” by Jim Collins et al provide examples and conclusions …. It is not clear though that those provide a utopian model to business. There is not yet a model, which provides an element of ‘guarantee’ for sustained existence over decades and perhaps centuries.
I could site Nokia as an example to learn something from. It was NOT a mobile phones company in 1865 when it was founded. But the story is perhaps well known. It is easy to downplay the fact that the executive and the board of the company completely changed the company’s industry many times over the last 140 years. It transitioned in stages always meaningful somehow to the old world and yet looking into a new horizon. The journey from a paper and pulp company to mobile phones is not obvious, even in hindsight let alone foresight.
From a business continuity point of view this means that real people made real decisions to go where no man had gone before, or just gently slid into expansions over time, which seemed rather natural extensions to the previous business, industry and model. Often both dramatic and smooth transitions are necessary for a company to survive over a long time. These move the company from the nurturing comfort of ‘others like us’ to ‘we’re going to have to figure this out for ourselves’.
It is odd then that the business schools have been teaching so many theories of business continuity, which really at some point kill the goose. Benchmarking [navel gazing], market research [quantified, history], competitive analysis [more navel gazing], etc