The Natural Step: Sustainability requires a paradigm shift

By George Zens

Karl-Henrik Robèrt was a cancer scientist and clinician and leading the bone marrow clinic in Sweden about 20 years ago, which is a very hard way of cancer treatment.
As he explained at a recent conference at the UW-Madison, he made a few observations there:

“One was that people are simply wonderful when life shows that side, because it’s extremely tough when children are at risk of succumbing to cancer. In that situation the parents, who are suffering more than anybody, grow to the extent where they can comfort the clinicians and the nurses. When we need to be strong, people are immensely strong.

“Another observation was that that same species that can spend millions and millions to make one person healthy, that same species is destroying its own habitat at the same time.
But it is simply not true that we are basically greedy and stupid and don’t care about our children or the environment.
Another observation was that scientists and technicians weren’t doing much about that. They were all digging deeper and deeper and increasing knowledge in their specific field, but very few were paying attention to the big picture that they could share together. And there is no intellectual reason to be sloppier with the big picture than with the details. Yet, that was what was happening.”

So he decided to try to help scientists to work together by asking their advice to create a robust picture of the whole system, and then give that to decision-makers in business and the universities and see what they would do with it.

“I decided to kick-start the process by writing a beautiful consensus-document with myself. I had complete consensus with myself: This is the truth, a very robust scientific worldview.
“And then I sent it out to the community telling them ‘this is the truth, could you please buy into it’. But when a scientist or professor is presented with something some other scientist or professor claims to be the truth, it is irresistible for them to find flaws in it, and they all did. So when this came back to me, it was completely stuffed with red ink.
Instead of giving in, I presented another version and after 21 versions we actually had a consensus about the big picture, which was enormous. We intuitively understood to stay away from details and continuously look at the big picture, and not allow my scientific colleagues to go too deep into their specific areas, unless I needed it for the big picture.”

According to Karl-Henrik Robèrt, the leadership of today is incompetent, incompetent about sustainability. It is a relatively new problem, a paradigm shift, and in the early stages of paradigm shifts, when the old order doesn’t work anymore, the leadership is incompetent.

One premise of the Natural Step’s approach is what the German scientist and author Frederic Vester called interconnected thinking, the recognition that the biosphere with its human societies and the natural environment is a complex system.

Karl-Henrik Robèrt uses the tree as a metaphor to describe this complexity. We can understand the whole system by taking a step back, but we can also take the opposite approach and get lost in the details of the leaves.

Individually we are ingenious when it comes to dealing with complex systems, whether it’s learning our first language, handling cars in traffic or playing chess.

On the other hand, in groups we often perform at a very low level when it comes to managing complex systems: The whole group is generally dumber than the dumbest individual member of that group. The reason for that is that a group often fails to scrutinize the overall rules of the system and to agree on what it is it wants to achieve before it actually starts to act.

But groups perform better than any individual if they deal with those fundamental issues first. In that case, the group can make use of a higher level of collective knowledge than any of its members could.

In other words, we have to apply systems thinking.

We systematically undermine our two “commons”, the social and ecological systems we depend upon for our survival.

According to Karl-Henrik Robèrt, it is not I unlike civilization entering deeper and deeper into a funnel. The leaning funnel walls denote that the problems we are facing are not isolated incidents affecting cropland, forests, marine systems, the atmosphere and social systems around the world, but are all getting more and more eroded simultaneously, with their negative effects continuously reinforcing each other.

As he points out, we are systematically losing more and more topsoil layers in agricultural land, and more and more biodiversity in forests and oceans. Greenhouse-gas rise to higher and higher levels in the atmosphere, as do the pollutants in our eco-systems. The population is growing rapidly and the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ is widening.

We undermine our habitat not because we are malicious, but because of system errors in our societal design. We have to correct those errors all the way down to the basic level if we want to get out of the funnel.

Sustainability is non-unsustainability.

For those decision-makers, especially in business, who understand the signs of the times this challenge to humanity will lead to new opportunities and benefits.
What will resources cost as we lose more and more of them in the funnel, while in a near future an increased world population of nine billion people will bid (or struggle) for what is left?

What will for instance be the price of productive fisheries in clean water, now that we can already feel the effects of over-fishing and pollution on fish stocks worldwide?
The markets are changing rapidly.

Decision-makers who understand the funnel and who plan to avoid hitting its walls, the risks of being hit by increasing costs of resources, waste management and insurance, to name but these, will be significantly and systematically lower. They will not only create new opportunities for themselves and their organizations, but also reduce their burden on the system, and, by being role models, contribute to reduce the total burden.

On the other hand, decision-makers who do not understand the paradigm-shift and prefer to continue with a business-as-usual approach, may call it ‘bad luck’ every time they hit the wall of the funnel, but they and their organizations will get hit by unforeseen (although foreseeable) cost increases for resources, waste management, tax, and insurance, as well as by lost market opportunities, poor organizational cultures and bad reputations.

Meaningful change will only come about if business and the community at large take the lead. According to Karl-Henrik Robèrt, the paradigm-shift towards sustainability can successfully only be dealt with by entrepreneurs and business leaders who manage the transition from the old paradigm to the new one.
According to him, we should not ask politicians to take the lead because they won’t:

“It is political suicide to do something before it exists.”

Also, they should take the lead: If businesses and the community take the lead, politicians will follow – “that’s democracy, the other way ‘round it is fascism”.
Meanwhile we need to take a globalistic approach towards becoming a more sustainable society. He characterizes the flawed attempt to deal with problems one by one and in isolation, i.e. out of context, as “reductionism. This is an impossible approach for success in complex systems, yet it is the most commonly applied one, at least in groups larger than five.”

It is an approach that virtually guarantees that by ‘fixing’ one problem we create another, often worse problem.

This widespread, piecemeal, way of dealing with problems is all the more astounding as its record is reliably miserable, and as the opposite approach is reliably successful.

He provides an analogy, which he calls ‘curing Mrs. Anderson from cancer’:
A rational clinical conferences, when all the experts – pathologists, physicians, surgeons, nurses, physiotherapists, social workers – have a shared purpose and mental model of the problem at hand: to cure the patient.

“None of these professional groups can cure Mrs. Anderson with her serious disease on their own. But they can do it together (…). Today the patient is the biosphere with its human society. It is suffering from the deadly disease ‘un-sustainability’. To cure that disease we need economists, business people, politicians, scientists and other professional groups. But how could we cooperate, unless we share a good understanding of the disease?”

The Natural Step approach calls for getting out of the traditional way of dealing with problems one by one as they surface and outside of the context of the whole system, and instead deal with problems by envisioning the healthy patient, i.e. a sustainable society, as the outcome of the procedure.

This is called ‘backcasting’: imagining a point of success in the future and then ‘backcasting’ from that point to the present.

The Natural Step’s scientific approach can seem complicated and abstract, but its goal of a sustainable society can be paraphrased in a common-sense way: Don’t waste, don’t pollute, live and let live, share the wealth.

According to Karl-Henrik Robèrt, people “are generally intellectually and emotionally intelligent. We are social, we have empathy, we love our children and we generally want to look forward to something compelling in the future. What is so difficult when it comes to sustainable development, which is all about applying those inherent human qualities?”

Maybe it’s what the Swiss author and businessman Hans A. Pestalozzi called “the manager’s schizophrenia”: As father and family-man, the manager is all in favor of clean air, clean water and fair wages. But as a hard-nosed CEO that same manager advocates pollution and exploitation in order to maximize short-term profits.

Once we overcome that schizophrenia and evolve beyond the robber-baron mindset will the paradigm-shift be successful.