Scaling up Research

Do we have the courage to learn a new mind-set? It is a fantastic human experience to understand basic principles for worthy goals together, across disciplinary and professional and ideological boundaries, and realize that we need each other to get there. Against that background, it is breathtaking that so few of our leaders know how to put full sustainability on the table, and to shape their debates and action programs and economies accordingly. The result is reductionist piecemeal attempts to deal with one issue at a time, commonly solving one sustainability problem by inventing another. Strategic planning towards sustainability is not something that “comes to you” if you are only enough engaged in the public debate, have a certain field of expertise, or admit to a certain ideology. What we need today are decision makers open to learning this competence, and the language that comes with it, a language which makes multi-sectoral collaboration possible at the scales required for success. Only then can potential leaders make relevance of their leadership, cooperate efficiently across discipline and sector-boundaries, and only then can they ask the relevant questions of scientists and experts. Robust and validated knowledge on such frameworks does not run in the face of a strong economy, it is precisely the opposite way around. We are currently loosing more and more money from increasing costs and lost opportunities due to insufficient leadership. And such knowledge does not run in the face of the freedom to embrace different values and ideologies, nor of the creative polarities that may follow from the confronting of values and ideologies with each other. On the contrary, creative polarities gain from not being grounded on poor knowledge and misunderstandings of facts and of other people. [Basil, Broman and Robèrt 2011]

Our greatest Sustainability problem is not climate change, shrinking biodiversity, poverty, or any other epochal sustainability challenge. It is the lack of strategic knowledge on how these problems are interconnected and can be tackled step-by-step while strengthening our economies.

The two traditional approaches of science for acquiring insight are useful but inadequate. One is to model how particular sustainability aspects or details relate to others, but as more inevitably get added, complexity increases and models become unmanageable. The other is to try to understand ever more deeply the system with the expectation that transitions will emerge and provide escape routes. However, transition strategies cannot be derived directly from the system.

If scientific exploration of the world with its un-sustainability problems is important but insufficient for deriving real-world solutions, then what’s missing?

We can’t keep sidestepping the key element of strategic planning which is to define where we want to be heading. If sustainability is what we want, then a powerful conception of its form must be on the table. Every leader responsible for investments must be able to see it clearly, be allowed to improve it through give and take, and be persuaded to own it as a personal and communal life mission. By piling up ad hoc projects piecemeal, each addressing separate sustainability threads, we have not been weaving an inspiring tapestry that people everywhere can believe in. Trusting that we have in us what it takes to construct a sustainable civilization is the key foundation of our eventual success.

Our sustainability tapestry is already in production. A fast growing breed of decision makers across the world has been learning how to apply a way of thinking about sustainability that brings self-confidence in its rugged simplicity, easy adaptability, and power to inspire. They:

1. Analyze how their own regions/cities/municipalities/organizations/planning-topics relate to basic
   principles of sustainability for the whole biosphere [ref¹s];
2. Co-create, together with stakeholders across sector- and discipline boundaries, goals that comply with the principles.
3. Design step-wise approaches to bridge the gap rather than incrementally “improving on previous practices”.
4. Allow this goal-orientation to inform how to (i) manage system boundaries, (ii) trade-offs, (iii) calculate sustainable resource potentials, (iv) make interdisciplinary and cross-sector cooperation
   systematic (v) ask relevant questions from scientists to inform new economies, indicators, and tools for
   modeling/decision-support/monitoring/communication [ref’s].

The greatest of all sustainability challenges is to arrive at a critical mass of leaders mastering this way of thinking. We can then, at last, escape the current “negotiations to get as high shares as possible of allowed destruction within planetary boundaries”. Sustainable development is not enough empowered by science disciplines, all separated from each other in silos. Experts on sustainability are typically amateurs on strategic planning, and strategic planners are typically amateurs on sustainability. Solutions are to be found in the interface, and shared robust principles for sustainability provides the coordinating link.

The new research center will be all about working between partners across the world, business, scientists, municipalities, business schools, all sharing a framework for strategic sustainable development. Together, we will derive profitable solutions across boundaries of sectors, and in value chains, and allow the results serve as role models for large scale transitions. Research programs will be developed that can empower the bridging of the gap to full sustainability, rather than incremental improvements without clear goals. A model for such systematic cooperation has already been tested in cooperation with five Swedish agencies in a research program called Real Change. The new center will draw from the results, and scale up.