Sustainability as an Outcome
I think we are fortunate to find ourselves in a time where sustainability is more frequently valued and prioritized than it has been in the past. I think few concepts push people and companies to truly think about long term outcomes and the ability of processes to continue on an indefinite timescale.
I also find modern business sustainability to be one of the most frustrating topics of discussion. It seems most modern businesses miss the point. The best way for me to illustrate this is by analogy. Think about health and weight loss. The two are highly correlated and end up in many of the same discussions. There is a strong case to be made that past a certain point you can't improve health without changes in weight. The problem is that a tremendously complex and multifaceted thing such as health is often reduced down to a single proxy metric: weight. So it seems with sustainability.
Carbon emissions seems to have become our proxy metric of choice. The fact of the matter is that you can have a process with net zero carbon emissions that still isn't sustainable. Think about a net zero carbon process that achieves this net zero by relying on cheap inputs to the system from some finite resource pool. Eventually the resource pool will be depleted. Conversely we could dramatically improve the sustainability of an existing process without changing it's current carbon emissions. Imagine our same process with unchanged carbon footprint, but now we have changed our input source to use inputs that are waste outputs from another process. We can chain processes such that outputs of one are inputs to another so that instead of two open ended processes, we now have a closed loop whose only losses are from internal inefficiencies, not system design.
Make no mistake, there are individuals and companies that are starting to take a more holistic view and move away from simple to understand, simple to track metrics, and get to the core of true sustainability.
My argument is that sustainability is an outcome and setting it as your goal is missing the point. It's like saying your goal is to lose 10 lbs. That may be the case, but losing weight is an outcome, you must do the things that lead to weight loss, you can't lose weight directly. Additionally, you are back to reducing health to a single metric. What if you were currently underweight? Imagine if the world viewed your attempts to improve your health as disingenuous because you were currently underweight and your goal was to gain 5 lbs. of muscle.
Additionally, I think putting a focus on sustainability as a goal is a good way to incentivize behaviors and choices that are chasing a local optimum instead of a global optimum. I would assert that if an individual or a business are properly defining the scope and scale of their systems and are chasing the globally optimal solutions, they will naturally end up putting in place sustainable solutions by default.
As a company, if your planning timeframe is 10 years you will make decisions to optimize outcomes at that timescale. If your planning timeframe is indefinite, you change your approach. Again this is not a either/or proposition, but instead, an "And" proposition. Companies and individuals trying to operate on an indefinite timescale recognize that if they have systems that depend on cheap inputs from a finite resource pool, cashing in now is done at the cost of having to find alternatives in the future. The local optimum chase would lead to the "cash in while business is booming" approach and say capitalize on the cheap inputs. The global optimum might look more like a feedback loop where profits from availability of cheap inputs are funneled in to R&D to find a more sustainable form of input or to couple the process with others to form more closed loop systems. Ultimately the difference is based on your timescale.
Think about Kodak and cameras. Kodak invented the digital camera and had a huge technological lead, but the film market was still booming. Why funnel profits from a booming business into anything other than that booming business? 30 years of hindsight makes that question seem silly, but the same thing is playing out again and again in multiple industries daily. Few companies took remote work seriously as an option prior to 2020. Now look at the world. The previous paradigm was how to we find the best talent in our market. Now it is how do we find the best talent in the world.
I wonder if the world were different and human lifespans were 10 or 20 times what they are, how different would decisions look? If you knew that you would be dealing with the consequences of your actions for the next 500 years, would you make different decisions? If you knew that your unhealthy body would still be the one you would have for the next few centuries, would you find more value in keeping it in tip top shape? 500 years of being out of breath walking to the mailbox is a pretty terrible thought.
I think companies should include more thinking on the indefinite timescale in their strategic planning. If nothing else, it acts as a check on unbridled action now. It's the business equivalent of passing on the extra slice of pizza now, because as much as you know you'll enjoy it in the immediate term, you'll also feel sick for the next two hours as you lament that you shouldn't have eaten as much.
The other side of decision making is in how individuals or companies define the boundaries of their systems. Just as defining the time of interest too short leads to chasing local optima, so too does defining the boundaries of systems too tight lead to chasing local optima. Every individual and business exists in the world. This means that to some degree, the internal systems are subject to conditions of the whole system, simply by merit of being within them.
More concretely, it is not enough to try and optimize the internal business process without concern for the existence of a broader system. Companies know this intuitively when it comes to labor. One of the ways to optimize internal systems is to reduce cost, and labor is a key way to do that. Pay less, profit more. If you examine only the internal system the way to hit a local optimum is to do just this. But that internal system exists within a larger system. Employees find better opportunity elsewhere and leave. Eventually the finite resource pool of employees willing to work for low wages is used up.
No system is fully insular, there is always spillover from the internal to the external. The choice to ignore this should be done with the highest regard and humility. Ignoring the effects of what spills from your internal system to the external has proven to be the downfall of many in the past. The interconnectedness of systems makes higher order effects difficult to predict. Instead of trying to think through these, the choice is often made to just draw a border around the system and say we can control within this so let's focus there. Whether you can control what is outside that boundary or not, eventually you will need to deal with it, so better to think about that in a considerate way earlier rather than later.
Chemical plants of all types have been posterchildren of ignoring the existence of the external. A community will tolerate destruction of their local environment to an extent that is typically proportional to how much support the population derives from benefits of the plant. But like all things in life, there is a tipping point. When the tide turns, the issue may be for situations outside your internal system, but if the trail leads back to your system, a new border gets drawn around it all and you are in the fray. Why not just expand the border yourself at the start? I think this is true sustainability.
Include some component of thinking on an indefinite timescale and don't forget your business exists in a broader market and, bigger yet, world. Simple shift in mindset, potentially huge shift in decision making. My whole contention comes down to this, that if you try to optimize given these constraints, sustainable decisions are a natural outcome. We have a world full of businesses that have honed their optimization skills. Those same skills can be put to use for sustainable outcomes, not by trying to optimize "sustainability metrics" within the current framework, but by letting the optimization skills loose on the world with a different timescales and system boundaries. Sustainability is an outcome of good decisions within the right framework, not better decisions within a limited framework.