The WHY of sustainability is clear….
For 50 years now, scientists have been warning us about the impending planetary emergency:
- that human activity is depleting the Earth’s resources, polluting and degrading the environment, resulting in a huge biodiversity loss 1,
- that our civilization has already crossed several planetary boundaries 2,
- that there are limits to growth 3.
WHY should we care? The planet will survive but become a far more uncomfortable place to live. While the toll on humanity’s health is starting to be felt all around in form of lives lost and ever-increasing healthcare costs.
But today, businesses, cities, nations, and most importantly, people, are starting to feel the impact of pollution, resource shortages and extreme climate events on their activities and in their lives, resulting in much higher costs of operations at the very least, up to supply chain disruptions, and potentially more dire consequences in the future.
The HOW is more complex.
At the global level, the past 50 years have illustrated our collective inability to address complex issues with old ways of working.
At the organizational level, leaders want to set a high ambition, yet, there is no straightforward path. Embedding sustainability throughout the business and engaging the entire organization is a challenge.
In both cases, apprehending the system as a whole is necessary to allow for integrated approaches, to break through silos and ensure investments in solutions that have no unintended consequences.
We believe that the paradigm shift – or system change – necessary to sustain a liveable planet for future generations can only be achieved through a collective intelligence enabled by collaboration.
Seeing the big picture, aligning collectively on the future we want and redesigning robust systems together is thus crucial.
Sustainability initiatives need a particular attention to change management and organizational development (structure, governance, processes, metrics) as well as culture and leadership, skills and methods.
This is where CONSTELLATIONS comes in, facilitating transformation processes including collective sense making, visioning and systems design.