Sustainability as a Principle

I was recently pondering a range of initiatives which have been either stopped as a consequence of questions of sustainability or which were framed to achieve enhanced sustainability. In all cases that I have looked at there appears to be a strong skewing to one aspect of sustainability - the natural environment.\

As a systems thinker I have often been struck by the fact that sustainability is generally only seen in terms of the natural environment. I think there is a more holistic view of this issue of sustainability.

I believe there are three distinct aspects to sustainability:

Sustainability in terms of the natural environment

Sustainability in terms of human performance; and

Sustainability in terms of the human enterprise.

Aspect one is well understood and is the default view of most sustainability "experts". Aspect two has to do with the capacity to sustain human life and human performance. It has to do with a macro view of the linkages between people, process, technology and the environment in order to create working and living environments which sustain and enhance the human capacity to find joie de vivre in work and domestic environments. The third aspect is the enhancement of the continuing development of the human enterprise.

Sadly the debate is dominated by the first aspect. This leads to a whole range of human behaviours including a determination to stop new industrial development, the not in my backyard syndrome, and an "us and them" approach to any organisation whether corporate or otherwise, that seeks to develop new enterprises. As I have commented previously, the human enterprise is about the continuing harnessing of technology through process to respond to and shape the environment for sustained human advancement.

If the human species is to overcome some of the challenges which it currently faces, a systems based approach to looking at sustainability is the only route to finding effective solutions. Those who would seek to wind back the human enterprise to some sort of pre-industrial or partially industrialised world have failed to look at the problems through all three lenses of sustainability. The advancement of the human enterprise is about ongoing improvement, learning and enhancement of the technologies and processes we develop.

Instead of attacking every time a new development is proposed we need to look at the problem through all three lenses of sustainability and see how we can enhance the sustainability of the enterprise rather than seek to terminate the development.

About slade

Slade is an Enterprise Architect, Business Analyst and Project Manager with extensive experience in the Defence, National Security, Emergency Services and secure systems environment. Slade has been in the IT industry since 1988, and is experienced in systems engineering, systems architecture, systems integration, security assessment and development of sustainment frameworks for new systems. He is also a thought leader in human factors for the design of critical decision support systems and environments and the development of enterprise and solution level architecture for high information workload environments. Slade is the Director of EcoThought Pty Ltd