Systems Thinking for Sustainability
The complex nature of large enterprises requires us to adopt systems thinking; leveraging our ability to see the parts of bigger mechanisms, recognizing patterns & interrelationships, and restructuring these interrelationships in more effective & efficient ways.
Environmental Life-Cycle-Sustainability Research, Assessment, & Modeling (ELCSRAM) an interdisciplinary, and mixed-methodological framework that provides the foundation for assessing the current-state of the organization, and integrating analytical models to inform decision-making in the development & identification of initiatives capable of driving sustainability.
ELCSRAM is an environmental impact assessment of strategic actions: policies, plans & programs, and their relationship with environmental, social, & economic impacts.
Mercer & Company
Generally speaking, the ELCSRAM is an environmental impact assessment of strategic actions: policies, plans & programs, and their relationship with environmental, social, & economic impacts. The ELCSRAM framework encompasses the processes of:
- Objectively assessing the current-state of organizations, and the existing sustainability practices employed, using research-driven approaches to data-collection, and the review of past documentation and current peer-reviewed literature base;
- Leveraging advanced statistical & programmatic models is the analysis of the data in order to evaluate & predict the impact(s) of an organization’s initiatives on the environment (the key is moving beyond descriptive statistics to the point where we can run predictive & prescriptive analytics); and
- Making data-driven inferences that are used to help inform decision-making, develop robust sustainability plans, and drive the implementation of sustainability plans & innovative strategic actions throughout the organization.
Systems Thinking for Sustainability
A system is ‘an interconnected set of elements that is organized in a way that achieves something’. It must have elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose, which can be found in any large enterprise.
The ELCSRAM approach is a perfect fit because it takes into account the architecture of the enterprise in assessing sustainability-net-impact. All of which is directly connected with long-term & true organizational sustainability. Furthermore, the ELCSRAM itself is a system-based tool since it aims to track environmental impacts of products (systems) through its complex supply chains (systems). In this sense, the ELCSRAM approach deals with systems that are nested within systems.
Sustainability
Adopting systems approaches within sustainability frameworks is crucial to deal with wicked problems of sustainability.
A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, & changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single exact solution to the problem; and “wicked” denotes resistance to resolution, rather than any related derivative of the word ‘evil’.