Imagine your doctor says you have a major artery that’s blocked, and immediate
action is necessary to mitigate the impending heart attack. You don’t like the
way it sounds and you know adjusting will take some effort. However, confronting
that blocked artery with the best data, knowledge, technology, support and
empathy is better than the alternative.
Would you leave the office and head to your favorite fast food joint? Or would
you sit down, create a plan to integrate incremental and healthy changes to your
lifestyle, monitor the situation, and then celebrate your success? Hopefully,
you’d choose the latter. This is the same situation we’re facing collectively at
every level in our communities, when it comes to the climate crisis.
Climate change is affecting us at a rapid pace — a development emphasized yet
again in the IPCC's highly motivating 1.5°C report
last year. The message was clear: If we maintain the status quo, our planet will
begin to break down and become inhabitable — not only for future generations,
but also for us.
More recently, in August, the Washington Post
reported
the following: “Here’s how the hottest month [July 2019] in recorded history
unfolded around the world...Wildfires raged across millions of acres in the
Arctic. A massive ice melt in Greenland sent 197 billion tons of water
pouring into the Atlantic Ocean, rising sea levels. And temperature records
evaporated, one after another: 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit in Cambridge,
England; and 108.7 in Paris. The same in Lingen, Germany.”
OK, Now What?: Navigating Corporate Sustainability After the US Presidential Election
Join us for a free webinar on Monday, December 9, at 1pm ET as Andrew Winston and leaders from the American Sustainable Business Council, Democracy Forward, ECOS and Guardian US share insights into how the shifting political and cultural environment may redefine the responsibilities and opportunities for companies committed to sustainability.
The good news is that we have and understand climate data. We’ve seen its impact
across public and private sectors, public health, transportation, food systems,
education and our communities overall. And, we have enough tools to begin making
change today at every level.
Practical, timely and effective solutions
Paul Hawken’s amazing team collected and beautifully illustrated 100 ways
to drawdown climate crisis-causing pollutants. Many
of these solutions are already taking place around the world, but in order to
see a truly effective impact, they must be scaled up. These solutions are
categorized in eight categories: electricity
generation,
food,
women and girls, buildings and cities, land
use,
transport,
materials and coming attractions (solutions that are currently being
tested).
Hawken ranks each of these pragmatic solutions per total atmospheric
CO2-equivalent reduction, the net cost of implementation, and the savings on
investment. The top ten solutions ranked by total atmospheric CO2-EQ reduction
include: refrigerant management, wind turbines, reduced food
waste,
plant-rich
diets,
tropical
forests,
educating
girls,
family planning, solar farms and
silvopastures.
These solutions are flexible and can be used in a variety of settings, including
the business community. What follows are three strategic skills that employees
can leverage in order to implement climate drawdown solutions within their
organization:
1. Design thinking
When organizations need to implement risk management, supply chain, emerging
markets and climate-related initiatives, having an employee base that is
trained in design thinking is instrumental.
Steps of design thinking are
defined
as:
- fully understanding the problem;
- exploring a wide range of possible solutions;
- iterating extensively through prototyping and testing; and then
- implementing.
As a result, design thinking helps individuals and teams approach solutions
through a methodological approach and allows failing ideas to fail fast and
often, so teams can get to positive solutions faster.
I’ve utilized design thinking principles when participating in sustainable
product innovation
exercises.
The design thinking process offered clear steps toward viable solutions to
complex challenges, while also allowing freedom and flexibility to propose
creative and actionable solutions.
2. Systems thinking
As our understanding of the world around us becomes more and more complex,
the ability to view that context from a systems perspective becomes more
vital to ensuring sustainable systems. Daniel H.
Kim,
co-founder of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, echoes this
need: “It’s been said that systems thinking is one of the key management
competencies for the 21st century. As our world becomes ever more tightly
interwoven globally and as the pace of change continues to increase, we will
all need to become increasingly ‘system-wise.’”
Much of what I studied in graduate school involved systems
thinking
— first applied to ecological sciences, and then to integrating
sustainability principles into private sector organizations. Practicing
systems thinking when navigating complex situations in search of
multi-stakeholder-optimized solutions takes practice, understanding, empathy
and an openness to understand differing points of view.
Offering opportunities through continuous education related to
sustainability, workshops, experiential learning and transformative
experiences for your employees to practice systems thinking in combination
with design thinking will allow you to find more effective climate
solutions, faster.
3. Pragmatic optimism
American author Allen Klein once said, “Your attitude is like a box of
crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray, and your
picture will always be bleak.” So, how can we add colors to the grim
situation we face in the current climate crisis? While it may be difficult,
it is advantageous for us all to practice not blind optimism, but
pragmatic optimism.
Pragmatic optimism is understanding from a systems- and design-thinking
perspective the situation you’re dealing with, while being able to remain
hopeful enough to not freeze in fear and
apathy.
Now more than ever, we need more empathy, grit, hard work and commitment to
move forward, as well as enthusiasm and enjoyment to take on the climate
crisis in a new light. When our attitude changes from pessimism and defeat
to pragmatism and optimism, possibilities for solutions grow and
stakeholders will be more likely to jump on board.
Practicing pragmatic optimism also allows us to view the changes needed as
not a deprivation of our luxuries, but rather as the ability to raise the
standard and quality of living for more people in our communities — which,
in turn, is beneficial to each individual and seamlessly taps into systems
thinking!
I am a huge believer in tiny actions adding up to have incredible, positive
impact. It takes one individual to inspire another to make a subtle improvement
to his or her life that alters an entire system. We have climate crisis data and
solutions — by implementing design thinking, systems thinking, and going about it
with a little fun through pragmatic optimism.
As Hawken said in a 2017
presentation at the Town Hall in
Seattle: “… this is [a] short life; let’s stay here, let’s have fun. We’re
granted the most incredible opportunity that any set of generations has ever
had, and it’s about reimagination.”
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Program Manager, UW Extended Campus
Amanda Goetsch is the Program Manager for UW System's Undergraduate and Graduate Degree Programs in Sustainable Management.
Published Sep 9, 2019 2pm EDT / 11am PDT / 7pm BST / 8pm CEST