Every day, we are discovering how systems are interconnected and inter-related. Some of these connections and interactions are the result of human activity, which created diversification due to imagination, and could integrate innovations in many technological, economic and natural systems, and also created some disequilibria.
According to the structure and complexity embedded into a “whole” system, human beings are still unable to solve, by themselves, the most significant sustainability challenges of our planet. They cannot continue locally reasoning about these challenges since our world is global and interconnected: we are never alone, instead a part of a huge puzzle; apparently, we are autonomous but not independent. Moreover, all around us, everything appears to be increasingly accelerating: all the information we need is everywhere and we cannot do anything without computerization. All the advances require new management and governance approaches, new ways of designing and developing future innovations in highlighting the interactions between people, processes and technologies, thus, the power of each constituent of our environment.
Seemingly, everybody continuously speaks of crisis, globalization, and this often amounts to justify our inability to overcome difficulties. Many causes of dysfunction are assigned, nowadays, to globalization and overpopulation. At present, the biomass accounts for an estimated one-third of all energy used in developing countries [LAR 00]. This energy consumed by human activity is inefficiently used even if it forms about 1% of the available world’s biomass (i.e. one-third of the photosynthesis activity on Earth). However, we need to be cautious with such an assertion, given that we can interpret such phenomena differently as being a cause of our troubles. According to the times in which we live, the concepts of globalization are embodied differently in various guises.
Let us develop this argument from a geographical point of view:
Within this context, markets are fragmented and clustered; competition is fierce between the main province and the different trading posts located in different countries worldwide conquered by the Roman Empire, which is beneficial in terms of responsiveness and economic development, yet, speculation rules and trade surpluses do not necessarily benefit Rome or Italy. Rome, however, did not adequately protect its production plants. For example, the manufacturing of Samian ceramics (products colored in red with relief patterns) was deployed, copied, relocated and then subject to a competitive reversal of sales channels, as we are witnessing in some industrial areas today. This unification is a linguistic issue first, and then gains a legal, culture and religious dimension. In this way, the Roman Empire could develop and perpetuate its “economic and political world”.
In fact, globalization is similar to an economic evolution. It refers to the worldwide acceleration in trading goods and services which is made possible through the implementation of new international regulations (the GATT1 and then the WTO2 by the end of the 20th Century) and through the development of the Internet and new transportation means (airplanes, etc.) at very low costs.
Today, we are discovering that any phenomenon in globalization, or generalization of a new organization, is always associated with the emergence of spontaneous orders whose unexpected consequences are far beyond what we could imagine. In fact, they are related to self-organization phenomena, as they occur in nature: they require the implementation of mechanisms, rules or principles governing the evolution of “natural” systems, starting from the inanimate world up to the living world. Our difficulty consists of applying these concepts to large populations, and not only at human-cell level, but at human-population and societal levels as well.
Such phenomena are necessary for the evolution of human beings. Certainly, they are creating a lot of turbulence, but they are beneficial to all of us: at the economy level, our well-being and our own human development. Finally, we have to focus on the very globalization we were facing: until a recent period of time, globalization was due to a competition between different civilizations. For example, during prehistory, then during antiquity, the change of civilization was nation independent: it was mainly characterized by major changes in the population dominance. Later, we were mainly involved with the domination of specific civilizations: Romans, Arabians, Europeans; now, since the last century, globalization has become an economic challenge. Thus, globalization is not a new concept. At present, however, how can we characterize globalization?
What we are experiencing today is a new opportunity of development for humanity. Globalization does not only address the universalization of the world by some countries: universalization is coming from worldwide companies. Hereafter is the list of top 10 companies, as published on July 8, 2013 [Fortune – Wikipedia]. It is based on the companies’ fiscal year ending on or before March 31, 2013.
The companies listed above are partly interdependent of their operations. And their sector activity is quite diverse. In terms of governance, the assumptions are definitely different since universalization is neither complete nor unique. On one hand, there is domination, always initiated or governed by deep and underlying desires, or reasons such as wealth, power and influence. Yet, this is a trivial view, even if well known from the mists of time. We should also keep in mind that the breaking changes at the civilization level are now being brought by various “dominating” contributors: economy, culture, army, politics, society (social networks), technologies, etc., all different and interdependent. As we dwell in a world of complexity, the universalization effect – a quite ambivalent concept – can result from a conjunction of these contributors acting together. As a result, sustainability is a global and multifaceted concept.
As soon as a big disturbance occurs in a society, globalization implies three main factors in the current context and biosphere:
A question arises as to “How do we manage sustainability?” To illustrate the point, we will highlight four recent and different examples: the 2008 economic crisis (subprimes), the nuclear disaster in Japan (hit by a tsunami in 2011), the recent international community attitude changes in Libya and the 2010 earthquake in the Republic of Haiti.
The first remark is that the country’s economic, social, political and cultural conditions are different in each of these situations. But, all of the above disasters targeted countries and victims irrespective of their origin, category in society and wealth.
The second remark is that the human population is only one factor (or agent) among others in nature: but, it is able to greatly influence both its environment and nature. Due to its own “eco-system” it created, human evolution will affect itself. As a result, human beings do not dominate civilization and economic development, they can only initiate changes and adapt themselves to the changing world around them. Should they not do that, civilization would disappear.
The third remark is that self-organization is a basic engine of adaptation. As we will see later, in each situation described above, interactions and feedback are everywhere: like ants, populations of people, when faced with unplanned events, can self-organize the relief supplies, the distribution of food, etc. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) appeared later, but they conform to the same global self-organizing process.
More generally, a human being is just an avatar of nature: they appeared, developed more and more complexity and will disappear someday, in an uncertain future, to leave the way for some newer civilization or some dominant and better-suited species. In this sense, we can say that we are a part of the heritage of nature (or DNA which is the seed, i.e. the information source of any life), created by a higher and “ad infinitum” order (“God”, for some believers), just as it is for all living things. We cannot escape ourselves, despite our ambitions and inclinations to manage and control the world, from the influence and power of nature.
In what follows, we will evaluate, on a nearer horizon and closer to our concerns, how big paradigm changes, or disasters, are impacting human behavior, its mind and thoughts, conscience and mode of governance.
In its evolution, any complex system is subject to so-called “catastrophes”. By catastrophe, we mean the notion of bifurcation or disruption with reference to the eponymous Rene Thom theory. This is some irreversible event creating a high disturbance. Moreover, the impact of such an event on all the elements involved may be either major or minor, but always unpredictable.
Most of the time, and due to globalization, a natural disaster, an economic or an industrial crisis, impacts the world’s growth. For example, when an earthquake graded above 6 on the Richter scale occurs in Japan, many technological production lines which contribute to worldwide supply chains can be disrupted. Experts estimate that Japan is producing and marketing 40% of the premium electronic components used worldwide: in case of trouble, this may strongly impact the world economy.
Accordingly, as soon as such a disturbance occurs, the purchasing departments of large industrial companies and electronic components wholesalers, somewhere else (e.g. in China or the USA) will anticipate the risk of shortages: they will over-react and rush on stocks, while placing backorders on critical components and subassemblies, not to interrupt their supply chain.
For example, for mobile interface device (MID) products only, several components such as flash memories from Toshiba, DRAMs from Elpida Memory, the AKM semiconductor electronic compass, the smart screens from Asahi Glass, etc., proved difficult to provide globally for several weeks. Or in the automotive industry, the Peugeot car maker was also impacted. In March 2011, this large manufacturer announced that 60% of its diesel engine production would begin to be disrupted, due to availability problems concerning the air flow meter: Hitachi could not supply on time because of the local earthquake.
In a different field, let alone a disaster, that is to say in a less tragic situation, the way of life and well-being of some people will impact some others at all times. How can this be? Recently, New Zealand announced a huge wine harvest planned in 2011 and at about the same time in 2010, the United States became a leading wine consumer in the world. These two combined events affected French wine industry. In parallel, as Italy celebrated its 150th anniversary of unification (March 17th 1861), an increase in sales of luxury goods and Champagne in Italy, and partly in France, could be expected. In our global networked whole, everything gets networked, everyone is interconnected and nothing and no one can be considered as isolated from its eco-system.
With regard to the best current knowledge we may have about systematization of data, business processes, etc., everything is holistic and holonic, everything is interdependent. Thus, most of the theories and paradigms based on the notion of independent elements or agents are gone, being irrevocably obsolete, at least at our mesometric environment scale. More generally, in terms of engineering:
The evolution of our planet, where everything is interacting with everything, is such that the “world” is getting “smarter and smaller”. Smarter in the sense that it is becoming more sophisticated, able to in a way emulate the abilities of a human brain. And, smaller in the sense that the dimensions of space-time are reduced in size. Here, we will never forget that all human activities must follow the rules of global sustainability. Within this framework, when a power plant is damaged by a tsunami in Japan, the consequences are numerous and can be analyzed in a global way in terms of flows, as follows:
Moreover, when a country belonging to a given pool of influence, such as Libya, Iraq and Syria, comes to be politically disturbed, this event has an impact on trade in the whole world given that markets will be disrupted or impacted by a confidence crisis. The disturbances are related to energy or raw materials supply; however, even if the technical impact on the world scene is a minor one, a catalytic effect on prices and trade may happen in short term due to nonlinear dynamic effects associated with sensitivity to initial conditions (SICs). The impact can be neither neglected nor ignored, since the interactions between economies are strong, unstable and uncertain.
Beyond the energy supply management problems that are generated by such unexpected “accidents”, restricting the issue at economic level alone is arguable: there are also humanity, justice and social challenges. Indeed, nothing can differentiate people leaving for other countries. We, on our tiny planet, constituted a unique, interdependent population with mixed cultures for millennia, and this is not a new fact as this kind of interdependence is even much older. One and a half million years ago, when our human species evolved and started its differentiation by standing up, we continued our evolution by hunting our prey on two legs. Consequently, for body-heat considerations, we lost our hair, and this enabled the development of our brain.
In parallel, we encountered cohabitation issues around food and energy with other animals. Animals, however are mainly ruled by “instinct” whereas humans lost their instincts and became ruled by “reason”. This is the reason why, compared to animals we better developed the capabilities of our mind to get a three level mental model as follows:
In this diagram, the arrows represent the inferences existing between two levels of the brain activity, from reactions to the psyche [TOO 97].
In a different domain, Haiti, arguably the world’s poorest country, is also in the same loop of influence. Following the January 2010 earthquake, more than 300,000 people died, 10% of the intelligentsia was decimated, 1,500,000 people became homeless and the country is still depending on some international assistance and financial support. Relief management and control requires many human resources and time. Even if, at the world scale, the final contribution remains modest, it will enable achieving much progress in several areas:
Through the above examples, we can say that the worldwide economy depends primarily on sustainability, which is to say on interconnected political systems, international stability, pollution control, the evolution of nature, a balanced growth, etc. Human beings adapt themselves to this changing environment rather than control it. Similarly, we are experiencing revolutions, uprisings and strikes without knowing when and how they will stabilize: again, we try to adapt ourselves reactively, since we cannot anticipate them.
Let us take another example in disturbance and risk management. As mentioned before, risk management is first a global concept. More specifically, in the insurance field, several compensation levels are now observed:
Thus, by way of these examples, new issues and problems emerge:
More generally, supposing nations are pulling out to give way to the community, how will contributions at the individual level increase? Should they double in the next decade? Can a nation be representative of a community inside it? Can a nation take the responsibility of a meta-governance or open governance? And last but not least, should we not give this responsibility to a single democracy? Or a “big” nation or organization?
During present times, while everything is interconnected, from individuals up to the nations together, what is happening in terms of power about the decision and responsibility of a national President? Of a CEO in a company? What is the possible true role of a leader: a dictator, a manager or a facilitator?
Ways of answering these questions depend on contextual situations. In our examples, the context being mainly social and cultural, the accountability disposition of individuals will depend, for instance, on their prevalent culture. A solution is never unique: it is a mix of antagonisms, dual principles and weak balances between financial objectives (for instance) and a population’s general interests. This is why system analysis in nonlinear complex systems constitutes a real advantage for those who are able to manage and understand such techniques.
It is argued that, in our post-modern society, individualization has become widespread. But, is this specificity compatible with the deeper expectations and new needs of each individual? Why are we permanently looking for protection against risks? Why do we rely so much on the so-called precautionary principle? What about global risk sharing: how do we share losses, damages, injury and efforts spent to restore a critical situation? Not only in a given country or a local community, but also at the world level?
Such individualization in our society, as now observed, is shocking for several reasons:
It is the same with ecology. In the near future, 10 billion people will have to be integrated and assimilated in our common meta-democracy. It will then be necessary to provide food for everybody, and then, some “nature-oriented” intents cannot stick with real needs. It is simply a question of balance between selfishness and altruism.
For all these motives, our countries, organizations or enterprise governance modes are bound to evolve given that we are in an interconnected and dependent world:
What is needed in our crowded world is an Inspiring Business Model, remembering that should we not be able to live together, we would perish together. Under these conditions, an inspiring business model is a way to motivate, emulate and orient the hopes of a whole population toward a unified common goal.
For millenia in the history of mankind, civilizations have always evolved toward greater complexity. Cooperation, emergence and self-organization are three particularly important concepts of the sciences of complexity. Self-organizing systems are everywhere: they are complex systems, and their complexity indifferently covers things, people, number of elements, number of relations, nonlinearities, broken symmetry, non-holonic constraints, etc.
Often, the most sophisticated civilizations are the ones that marked and influenced a world era: they often become a model to foster economic development, deploy innovative sciences and technologies, and new cultures, and are also a way to evolve faster and more efficiently.
Consequences are quite simple to envision. With regard to what is mentioned above, all around us in nature, we are always faced with evolutionary systems. Some will say that dynamicity is not a global property, but this statement is wrong since nature, based on a unique underlying concept, is not a static system. In terms of flow of time, everything is a relative issue and, as developed in this book, everything is based on ambivalences, knowing that at any moment it will be one or the other of two antagonisms that will prevail. Given that the dominant keyword in modern systems, nearer to a singularity, is “emergence”, this new concept will be associated with “uncontrolled state”, which is a concept opposite to “dominance” [FUC 01] (Figure 2.4).
In this figure, a self-organization property between the various elements (agents) of the system is the result of the continuous interactions between the elements of the system. The pattern that progressively appears at system level is a so-called “attractor” that dictates a global behavior at elements level.
We can transpose this mechanism to any social system and observe (see above experienced examples) a similar kind of self-organization cycle operating that will simultaneously involve structures and agents included in the complex system (Figure 2.4).
As we transpose this principle to the governance field, we easily understand the reason why democracy has grown for centuries and became a governance mode more elaborated than dictatorship. Democracy is less directive, more respectful of a species and also more difficult to implement because it must take into account the sensitivities and the diverse needs of every citizen. The principle of emergence is not yet well understood, controlled or accepted. We are still far from the notion of “citizen constitution” or “management driven by employees”. Moreover, it is common, in France, to affirm the statement “truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error beyond”. This shows that such a paradigm change is not ready to be implemented to ensure a sustainable governance in a widely interconnected world [PAS 77].
A similar trend appears nowadays in economy and industry. Some Western companies require their subsidiaries in the Middle East to, for example, adopt their global practices and management systems, whatever their cultural, economic and technological environment. This search of consistency, however, may raise different issues. Complaints arise in business meetings in e.g. Africa or India like “this management system is not adapted to our culture; it lacks flexibility”. As said, we are bound to solve organizational, cultural and technical problems first. Even within a same country, among the populations living either in the Northern or Southern part of a nation, the employees of a same company exhibit differences: it is not uncommon to highlight the lack of constancy or reliability suitable to some people, the lack of methodology to perform some work, depending on whether one work in one or the other part of the same country.
Such discrepancies are not only due to geographical characteristics: however, skilled and competent leaders may become conspicuous by their tendency to uniformity, in terms of practical management and real-time risk anticipation and evaluation. This attitude may lead to inconsistent decisions, which are not oriented toward global and well-agreed objectives.
As a result, in order to restore the sustainability of the system under study, new trends are still required that will again change our mode of governance:
However, to work properly, methodologies need to be carefully designed: to avoid communication problems, which are customary in any network, the processes, operating procedures and protocols need to be defined with great care to ensure the best consistency.
Big unpredictable changes, coming from an unknown location, can always be expected and will conduct the development of new approaches and technologies.
By analyzing the globalization of the worldwide business, we see that an evolution occurred. Not so long ago, the concepts related to “nation” and “patriotism” led to different population categories, which were intended to provide some protection, preserve assets, goods, culture and resources, etc. And thus, some boundaries have been implemented. Yet, by now, such isolationism tends to be reduced more than ever due to globalization. And this leads to a gradual disappearance of physical borders, the individualization of our society that overcomes the borders to achieve its goals, build extra national communities or develop new and wider ways of thinking which gradually involve the whole of humanity. Active momentum from hedonism will be the next step; in other words, hedonism will continue to drive and orient the above evolution.
In fact, a distinctive human being who is specifically alone and individualist cannot exist. As everybody knows, the proletarian or the rascal who is living alone, has few possessions and no physical attachment, is not committed to a house, land or sea. He has no country, no nation and is hungry of everything; he is not a “national” man, yet, a “global being”.
The same behavior applies either to unstructured organizations or to companies lacking corporate culture. Under such conditions, we can consider some specific companies’ employees: staff become suspicious about the closed world of a given business. According to an individual open culture, they are no longer leading to a specific structured company, but to a social system; if they are quite skilled or endowed with a very specific capability, they are like rare birds feeling lost in a given organization. They tend to progressively create professional corporations on the Web, along with similar rare birds belonging to various enterprises or business groups. These employees soon gather over social networks, outside the small world of an enterprise or a nation to form new social entities and technical (or not) associations, based upon internal and formal rules, modes of thought, etc. All criteria in favor are different from those prevalent in their company or business of belonging. They constitute a community of professionals to which they are attached: their involvement is first dedicated to their organization in which they are able to share knowledge, to find some intellectual fulfillment, where they can develop their personal growth and evolve in terms of business skill and leadership.
At the same time, these professionals are working in their respective worldwide companies, they begin growing “global professional” groups and associations (one example was the PMI – Project Management Institute), or world guilds based on values, philosophies, ideals and practices recognized worldwide (such as non-profit service organizations, NGOs, etc.). The result is that they may become sometimes quite unconcerned by their original business affiliation.
Thus – and certainly without going as far as running a Wikileaks-like business – we can imagine what may happen, for instance, when a nuclear plant is in trouble. The whole of humanity is rapidly aware of the failure; each individual feels involved with the matter since a distorted and interpreted information is broadcasted everywhere on a real-time basis. As polluted clouds may pass over oceans and countries, everybody gets worried due to the weather impact and dust fallout. Everybody, however, is faced with the same risk. Whatever the importance of an event, there is always a skilled team acting and standing against a possible common danger. But, what was unknown before, is now known and mobilizes lots of people. According to the context and the sensitivity of each population, there is always a global impact that that will manifest itself locally on decisions, in very different ways. For instance: some of them will be reactively taken and lead to different decisions. For instance, China may postpone its nuclear program, Germany may delay some investments and the United States, like France, may be reviewing their security plans, etc.
Issues about the risk related to a nuclear power plant are global. A collective consciousness arises from the many interactions that exist among behaviors and ways of thinking at individuals level – themselves depending on political point of views, social impacts, the difficulty to recover a situation, the corrective technological possibilities, etc. These phenomena are specific to complex systems and will result in the emergence of a new type of consciousness and governance. Such approaches are still unusual and unexpected in our organizational strategies. We will, therefore, develop them later in this book in a chapter dedicated to “social emergence – social innovation”.
What should be done in an enterprise? Aforementioned concepts should remain under control since, at human resources level, individual behaviors associated with unconscious collective behaviors, or collective consciousness, can be feared strongly linked to certainty. What is happening to others can also happen to us, with certainty. Even if we do not know when or where, it may affect and imply an entire corporate culture, therefore, the organization’s sustainability.
By catastrophism, we tend to mean a societal situation, which may be generated, often developed by the media, and then amplified by the Web, like a breaking evolution. Based on an example, we will show how, in the field of ecology, people are tackling “ecologism” (i.e. ecology+ideology) rather than sustainability. We should avoid falling into this trap.
The first observation is related to the fact that what is “good” in a process is generally regarded as “normal” or usual, while what is “bad or evil” is different but found attractive because it breaks monotony. In fact in our lives, we are foremost interested in what goes wrong, anything that disturbs. We tend to emphasize what is collapsing, dying, disappearing or, at least, changing and many people are subject to negative thinking and pessimism. Why is it like that? The answer is related to survival and resilience; it is common in nature and will be analyzed in Chapter 3, since the perception of sustainability depends on it.
If we analyze the behavior of some alter-globalists, one interpretation could be as follows. They often imagine complicated and Machiavellian fixtures not devoid of hidden political motivations; are sometimes quite arrogant and would like to dominate society, pull business and control some markets. Also, because of their more local approaches and lack of systemic view, they cannot fully embrace an issue and would cause economic disasters or could be partly responsible for a crisis. Alter-globalists do not show themselves being global.
A simplistic view of life ignores the complexity of systems based on a large number of nonlinear interactions that make any ecosystem a non-predictable one. The appropriation of property, goods and power led by a few people, in order to give and share them within a population, does not change anything. It is impossible to regulate or control the sensitivity to initial conditions (SICs) criterion and we cannot predict what the situation will be a few months later. This is especially true if we study the impact of the last paradigm change described above, i.e. the coming from a society of duty (based on notions such as “all-work-and-no-play”) and moving toward more hedonism (of “flamboyant display”-type). As a result, we are observing individualization in society, a need for freedom and a greedy attitude for getting more money fast. Within this framework, and to achieve such a goal, society has to be “deconstructed”, i.e. to lose its traditional references and moral values. This approach has already been reported by two Nobel Prize winners, Albert Camus and Joseph Stiglitz. During his introduction speech in Stockholm, more than 50 years ago, Albert Camus said:
“Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.” [CAM 57].
In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus stole the fire belonging to Zeus to give it as a gift to humanity and to teach it the art of metallurgy. Today, prometheanism still triggers fear of chaos, which stands in agreement with the principle of “ambivalence”, so common in nature. Yet, in terms of governance, how can we manage this? Two categories of people come to mind:
These attitudes are pretentious and ingenuous: such thinking ignores the power and capacity of evolution in nature. We have to control any “sardonic nihilism” attitude since self-organization will help in self-regulating the system under study.
On both above sides of any organizational or entrepreneurial hierarchy, a human being remains proud and cocky, also disturbed, superstitious and religious. He is also interested in everything related to the survival of his species, its evolution or extinction. This is a reason why management will appear so vague and uncertain. Besides, about the survival issue – which is a specific factor of sustainability – what can we say about the loss of the human species? What are the direct or indirect impacts? Some considerations:
There are two possible interpretations:
Consequently, this second assumption can be interpreted as being on the way to the death of: civilization, an enterprise, or any kind of organization. Thus, as well as for the “Greedy Attitude”, there arises the concept of “Green Attitude”: preventing our fears about the evolution of our environment. In each above case, everything starts with good intentions and collective consciousness, moves forward with more and more ideology or dogmatism and finally ends with business, or any external domination under the pretext to bring either more freedom or help and release.
As we see, an evolution always happens in approaches and goals pursued either by individuals or by “strong” management, which arises from our contradictory behaviors because we are, at the same time in our life, both producers and consumers. We want:
All these examples fall under people’s hedonistic pressure: to want everything faster and cheaper. But, in modern societies, the big question comes from ignoring the basic rules of evolution: everything starts with a so-called “order” (or steady state), and after a disturbance or disruption, everything ends with the emergence or the continuous search of new organizations and “orders”.
When considering a nonlinear dynamic system – and this is all too common in nature: a plant, the weather, a population behavior, etc. – the same phenomenon is observed: a stable stage is never permanent. As soon as a given “order” is reached, a disturbance may occur which leads to “chaos” in the sense of system complexity; then followed by a self-organization mechanism, from which a new order can then emerge.
Compare this with the situation presently observed in our society: after a period of order or steady economic growth (usually, comforting and profitable) and a period of technological advances (more well-being oriented), we dread any disarray or change. An excessive attitude far from cardinal virtues because those are hinges upon which the door of moral life swings.
Before attempting at an answer, what would a more sensible question to ask?
This sort of question in the complexity context is much more relevant to leaders and decision-makers who are accustomed to usual management practices. In reality, there is another way of thinking that should concern everybody, given that new policies and approaches are emerging.
As already stated, complex systems are unpredictable; consequently, there is no point trying to predict when and how an uncertain event will occur, but to define strategies under uncertainty, finding new opportunities of action and develop adaptability and flexibility. Thus, the new challenges are:
That it is impossible to accurately predict the evolution of a system or the reactions and behaviors of a population leads to postulate that it is often more useful to question our assumptions and achievements. There are four reasons: to better study the structure of the input data, to identify the underlying mechanisms of our evolution, to reverse our thinking modes and operating practices and then to consider the importance of interactions and examine the opposite of what seems most likely.
A second step consists of questioning our internal organization. It is most important not to reinforce our capability to withstand turbulences and to face new uncertainties only, but to anticipate. Anticipation requires not making plans about when an unexpected event will occur, but to prepare our organization and skills to deal with uncertainties and respond to the new resulting opportunities better. In fact, most important is to be offensive and reactive rather than defensive. Sustainability is first a question of adaptivity and not a palliative care issue.
This approach has a corollary: it allows us to detect and identify indifferently either a “weak noise” or a “weak signal” included in the information and to challenge initial, apparently “obvious”, assumptions, which require first performing an in-depth examination of the unexpected, unplanned and unsuspected qualitative aspects of all issues that may arise in a complex system, and then to systematically consider the opposite of the predictions we can make. The impact may be substantial: by their nature, “weak signals” may not be sufficient to attract the attention of scientists and managers, who often suffer from information overload while juggling many competing priorities under significant time pressures. Help in such methodology comes from the great advantage brought by the systemic and collective approaches already mentioned: the challenging and questioning conventional decision-making processes, associated with the emergence of a universal consciousness and self-organization, giving emphasis and strength to minor and significant ideas, hidden and under-estimated signals, which can provide an unsuspected power and influence.
To complete the discussion, media and scientists are often faced with the question of “why?”; why such event happened in a given context, a particular situation, etc.? An ideological and presumptuous approach, since discovering the origin of a fact or the underpinning facts of an existence, is a very difficult task. Again, we must separate the issues that we are able to ask:
What is important is to see that the world is globalizing any concept; questions and issues such as emerging responses are determined globally and worldwide. It is, therefore, very important to have a holistic view of a problem in order to process it correctly, rather than to keep challenging philosophical considerations, interpretations, speculations and rumors that fuel, again and again, new emerging rumors, which are in themselves, not useful for our society.
We consider two activities in this section: anticipation and prediction.
Their difference is easy to define:
In the following chapters, we will develop them without introducing a new paradigm. Let us first summarize what exists in terms of conventional techniques, and how to activate them, in order to merely improve actual production systems. Here is a classification of most of the tools and methods used in economy and industry:
We can state that few companies and organizations have developed the skills and technologies necessary to understand the meaning of some data and information, and to determine a comprehensive evolution of complex systems. In this area, two approaches should be noted:
In fact, to explore and perform anticipation and exploration about the future of complex systems, we could use a wide spectrum of technical methods. Hereafter is a detailed table, which compares the use of different technologies with an indication of when and how to use them. We would stress that a lot of efforts and investments still have to be assigned on this subject.
What about the final objectives of “anticipation” and “prediction”. Most people and decision-makers think about “risk analysis”. Obviously, a risk (e.g. financial, economic and physical) can be assimilated to a disruption, representing a risky and negative situation we try to avoid. However, this is a limited view. Evolution, in nature, is “dual” and is based on stabilities, instabilities, chaos, catastrophes, disruptions, etc., just to be able to switch (faster and at low cost) toward a “better” self-organized situation. In this sense, nature is far more optimistic than humans. This is why, it would be advisable not to have a human being managing and piloting nature, but, as observed, nature controlling the human species. In this way, we replace ourselves in a natural pattern where man is positioned at its genuine place in nature’s global world.
In this section, we have seen how some strategic concerns in the business field evolved, while no real novelties appeared in terms of globalization or paradigm changes. Not long ago in the 1940s, many of us have experienced the quality assurance trend movement: a thinking line which has enabled Japan to recover economically due to well-known people such as Pr. Demig or Pr. Juran, etc. In France, this movement took off in the early 1970s and mainly covered two domains: the technical and economic aspects of quality.
As our skills and control technology in quality were developed, the performance aspects of a process were naturally considered gradually: many efforts were devoted to sampling techniques (initially based on the DOD sampling plans) for instance, but also to the control of “total quality” and “non-quality”: it was an opening toward the so-called notion of “global quality”.
In the late 1980s, the notions of competitiveness were looked at through a couple of elements such as “quality performance” and then “global-performance” of the processes. This global evolution was considered as a normal one and was related to global economic requirements: several successive crises and conflicts in which the Western countries were involved convinced decision-makers to change their practices and maintain a high level of investment and development. For this purpose, it was necessary to pay shares/dividends on stocks to international investors: “global performance” and “profitability” then became an economic challenge and are now part of global criteria used in the Western companies.
Such a move was accelerated by the advent of the Internet, and changes in our global society have now modified the context. For over 10 years, the overall economic performance is integrating the so-called “social performance”: economy now takes into account the concepts of corporate social responsibility (CSR), and is more recently developing longer lasting solutions with concepts such as sustainability and equity.
Our economy is also beginning to integrate the concepts of ethics in business, counterbalancing a widespread greedy attitude of the 2000s after the subprime crisis. It is now associated with professional ethics, ethical trade, etc. a move that originates from the generalization of global economy and local/global governance aspects.
These societal changes are necessary given that they introduce novelty, new questioning and diversity. Still, let us not delude ourselves: any change in society always follows a sequence of several chronological steps/phases:
It is, therefore, not surprising that companies change and adapt themselves by moving toward “sustainability” in order to easily integrate approaches based on the enlarged concepts of “overall and sustainable performance”. As for what happens in nature, firms are seeking competitive leverages to develop, survive and grow by themselves.
We provide another example to explain what kind of changes and trends can be implemented in terms of governance, within the administration of an organization, a country or a nation. The matter is related to the taxation system as defined by a Finnish government. The evolution of taxes is as follows:
Because it follows a logical evolution, this hierarchy is considered as historical, chronological and normal in people’s minds. In terms of sustainability and social responsibility, ethics and solidarity priorities, these could not be ranked properly but a philosophical approach exists. It remains highly probable that future cultural changes and priorities would reverse the above ranking both for firms and governments.
In more technological fields, we will remind ourselves that governance, or corporate governance, consists of a management system by which companies are directed and controlled (the Cadbury Committee, 1992). From a holistic point of view, this involves a set of relationships and interactions between a company’s top level management, the shareholders, providers, customers, society, etc., which represent all stakeholders. The purpose of this networked system is to find the most appropriate solutions and well-balanced proposals given a general interest, while avoiding or preventing any conflict of interests between the stakeholders.
This approach is based on the right processing of information related to the processes, specifications, policies, practices, rules and laws which have an impact on the way a global system is controlled. Also, right governance essentially depends on information disclosure, since good monitoring is mainly correlated with right degree of information control and decision-maker power. Any information discrepancy between knowledge levels, among stakeholders will introduce some bias and deviances in the decision process. This is why, according to our culture, several successive philosophies will be adopted:
This is why theories of information are changing: we are entering a knowledge-based economy. An economy based on such a model leads to a new concept called a knowledge society. It is a spectacular change and many academics and decision-makers do not hesitate quoting a new theory of power: who shares information is power.
Consequently, for the purpose of sustainability – and this is what nature teaches us – we are left to consider everyone as an actor of our evolution: “who creates information is able to bring and generate new orders (an attractor); the one who best suits these new orders and adapts to their emergence will control the new powers”. We are in a dynamic mode: human beings can neither control the evolution of a system nor generate a specific global system. But, this emergence is the result of a given diversity. Such diversity is never haphazard or random: nature is highly ordered and everything is governed by emerging, stable and very consistent underlying mechanisms. Our systems are “diversity-controlled”. Whoever believes keeping more control in the real world and imposing his laws may instead act and speak with more humility and respect:
What gives spirit to Society,
What makes it fun, is Diversity,
Its strength is its Adaptivity,
And Decline comes from Uniformity.
Chapter 3 will deepen the study of some characteristics and underlying principles that will influence the mode of governance which we have to deploy in our modern societies.