Over the summer I have been reminded, again, of the perilous state of the world’s environment and the need for perhaps less planning and more institutional reform. 

On July 2, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported that governments worldwide are failing to stem a frightening drop-off in biodiversity that threatens extinction for almost half the world’s coral-reef species, a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals. As the IUCN report succinctly put it: “Life on Earth is under serious threat.” Meanwhile, a report released on September 2nd by the Royal Society, Britain’s leading science academy, underscored the accelerating risk of global climate change: “The global failure to make sufficient progress on mitigation of climate change is largely due to social and political inertia, and this must be overcome if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.”

There are at least three reasons why we should care about these two reports:

1. First, humans are directly affected by the changes taking place. Coral reefs, for example, feed a large portion of the world’s population; protect tropical shorelines from erosion; and are home to plants and animals that (a) have an intrinsic right to exist, and (b) have untapped potential as sources of new therapeutic drugs. Climate change has the potential to swamp coastal cities worldwide with rising sea levels caused by melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica – to say nothing of devastating other parts of the globe through droughts, hurricanes and other forms of severe weather. Bottom line, humans have some serious skin in this game.
2. Second, the reports paint a picture of accelerating change; the conditions that make life on Earth possible are deteriorating at a faster rate than previously thought. The decline in amphibians reported by IUCN should worry us all because frogs, in particular, are excellent indicators of global environmental health – they play the same role as the ill-fated canaries in the coal mines of yore, whose death signaled that poisonous or explosive gases had reached dangerous levels. Kenneth Dodd, a research zoologist at the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Florida-Caribbean Science Center put it well when he observed: “If all the animals were dying in a pond, would you want to drink the water? We breathe the same air, we drink the same water. We live in the same environment. If something is affecting them, it’s affecting us.” And as Craig Stewart of the World Wildlife Fund reported on September 2nd, Arctic climate change is happening faster than anyone anticipated and may soon force more rapid warming on the rest of the planet: “We thought by 2050, multi-year ice would be cut in half. Well, it happened in 2007.” Bottom line: don’t move to New York, Vancouver or Shanghai anytime soon.
3. Third, and most relevant to this column, these changes are happening despite many well-intentioned strategies, policies and plans. The Convention on Biological Diversity, for example, was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (The Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While the focus of the convention is on the development of national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, it is also widely (and rightly) seen as a foundation strategy for sustainable development. A lack of progress against the twin goals of biodiversity protection and sustainable development would be bad enough, but further erosion in the face of an international convention with the sole purpose of protecting these goals is worrisome indeed. Similarly, as the nations of the world prepare to gather in Copenhagen in December for the United Nations Climate Change Conference of Parties and forge an international agreement on greenhouse gas reduction as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, it is sobering to think that we have been working at this for at least 15 years — the Kyoto Protocol was drafted in 1997 — and the build-up of carbon dioxide has gotten worse, not better. Bottom line: humans have a track record of not delivering on the promise of well-intentioned plans to protect the environment.

I have long been interested in the fact that governments, businesses, academic institutions, and NGOs worldwide have plans in place that would do much to support sustainability, and in many cases elected officials, CEOs, and the like who have endorsed such plans, but the human trajectory as a whole continues to run counter to sustainability. While there is a growing number of case studies that can inspire us, these are, sadly, islands of sustainability in an ocean that is profoundly stressed. We need to do better.

We need to identify and overcome the barriers that stand in the way of a course correction. For me, this means proportionally less emphasis on strategies and plans, and more emphasis on the organizations and institutions in which those plans are intended to take root. My working hypothesis here is that we spend too much time crafting a “great plan” without thinking about how the organization or institution might need to be reformulated for the plan to actually work. And so it is that we see cities, businesses, and others flail about pursuing the dream of sustainability. The strategy or plan may be fine; what is not, and what needs to be fixed, is the organization itself.

To help us get started, there is no better source than Alfred Chandler’s classic text, Strategy & Structure (1962). Chandler, an economic historian as well as a management theorist, observed that large American businesses struggled with organizational structure as rapid growth taxed the administrative reach of the management team. The result was to design organizational structures around the tasks most critical to the success of the firm’s strategy.

Taking Chandler’s ideas and applying them to an environmental or sustainability context means letting go of conventional wisdom around “the ways things are done.” Whether a local government, a multinational company, or a United Nations Agency, we need to make strategy-critical activities the main building blocks of organizational structure. Put another way, we need to ensure our well-intentioned 21st century plans for sustainability are matched by 21st century institutions.
 
Rob Abbott, PhD, CMC, (rabbott@stratos-sts.com) is Director of Sustainability at Stratos Inc.

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