Grow This: Learning and Systems Practice
PART THREE: Pragmatism and Insights from Systems Practice
One respondent last week said, “you need to define ‘degrowth’. At face value it implies shrinking our economy, population and limiting productivity in the service of some unspecified utopia.”
My first reaction was to ask myself, “Didn’t I make my assumptions clear?”
Well… no.
(Gosh, it’s almost as though I expected everyone to know the framework of value I use, without me telling them. How often do people do that? (IKR)
…Leaders especially. …No, not you, the other leaders.)
~ ~ ~
So, there’s three things I’d like to do in this third article on the topic:
1) State my assumptions,
2) Give a simple definition of ‘degrowth’, and a referral to a great introduction of the topic; and,
3) Share insights, primarily from two luminary speakers at #INCOSEIS, that help us to shift towards pragmatism, well-away from serving some “unspecified utopia”.
1. Assumptions
Here’s a few assumptions I held as I started writing these three articles:
Assumption 1: We live in a world of finite resources, and we can’t keep expanding economic growth forever.
Assumption 2: When leaders prioritise profit and earnings per share, short-term economic gains diminish social and environmental sustainability.
Assumption 3: Our extractive economic practices must change and keep changing to fit with a changing world if human life is to prevail with genuine progress.
Assumption 4: The world is complex and entangled. Every issue is a systemic issue.
Assumption 5: We can’t plan our way through complexity; we must change our ways of thinking, deciding and learning to address emergent and unintended consequences.
Assumption 6: We’ve been looking outward for solutions and leadership, underestimating the power of our individual and collective capacity to drive change. We’re far more powerful than we often realise.
2. Degrowth – Definition and Reference
I think of ‘degrowth’ as a convenient label for reducing the human ecological footprint on the planet, requiring a shift in thinking and practice to deliver higher levels of sustainability and well-being, not just for human life but all life.
For a richer experience, I encourage everyone to explore Dr Erin Remblance’s fabulous introduction of ‘degrowth’ [1]. Wherein she challenges the current paradigms on growth with facts, in short saying “no country is meeting human needs within planetary boundaries.”
Worse, she adds, “the economic system is imposed by force… is structurally undemocratic and unjust… and is at war with Nature.”
Degrowth then, she argues, “is a phase to get back within the carrying capacity of the planet.”
And, rightly, concludes, “change will not come easily.”
Degrowth then is about us knowing Nature’s boundaries and bringing our thinking, deciding and learning within those limits. Growth is a consistently a part of Nature, it’s everywhere, every day, in every living thing. But constant economic growth isn’t.
So, I return to writing from a place consistent with my assumptions that align with Dr Remblance’s presentation but without the force and coherence of her argument.
I’d prefer to take more of an engineering perspective, see growth vs degrowth as something problematic and explore whether we can find ways of working artfully together to make (better) things happen within Nature’s boundaries.
So, in the rest of this article, I will round out my ‘take-aways’ from the #INCOSEIS in Dublin with insights from two global leaders in the complexity and systems sciences: something to learn from experience and from opening new ways of thinking.
Tack 6: Leadership in a ‘TUNA’ World
Brian Collins, Emeritus Professor of Engineering Policy at University College London, gave the opening keynote at #INCOSEIS on ‘Systemic Leadership in a TUNA World – How to Improve Policy Making’. His keynote offers some advice on the challenges of tackling big problematic issues.
Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash
For clarity, TUNA refers to turbulence, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity, all of which are happening at once in the world, not just the oceans. It’s worth recording Professor Collins’ explanation of these:
Turbulence – is a state of confusion without any order, in which you experience the unpredictable without precedent. How often have political leaders used the term “unprecedented”?
Uncertainty – what you know from the past is no longer a good indicator of plausible futures. New parameters may be more important and old ones less so. The challenge is to challenge one’s assumptions.
Novel – our experience may be less relevant as novelty arises in unexpected emergent properties from the joining of systems.
Ambiguous – prior knowledge is less useful in analysis, as the assumptions we make about the validity of models may become ill-founded.
While there are some parallels with the more popular VUCA acronym (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity), TUNA stresses the dangers of relying on what we already know, as our patterns of thinking may be less relevant.
In a way, it reminded me of Professor John Vervaeke’s thinking on recursive relevance realisation, which is a “theory of how cognition continually redesigns itself to fit the changing world." [2]. We must keep challenging old and existing patterns of knowing, thinking, deciding and learning to fit with the changing world. What we’ve just learned might not be helpful with what we’re about to face. Complexity puts higher demands on our cognition.
Professor Collins spoke to his work with the Royal Academy of Engineers, Engineering X Safer Complex Systems (SCS) mission with engineers examining 18 case studies around the world about “how approaches to the design, construction, operation, management, or governance of complex systems have resulted in safe or unsafe outcomes.” [3] (The reference links to the RAEng website – it’s well worth exploring.)
I was struck by the following lessons he offered to the INCOSE audience:
⁃ Leaders should establish an integration authority for all projects, more so those with high social impact.
(Hint: Seek out advice from competent people like those mentioned in these articles or INCOSE Past Presidents or your nearest INCOSE Chapter.)
⁃ Integration needs to occur early, in the concept design phase. If you place it in the procurement phase, it’s already too late because the project (like the problem it seeks to solve) has already been broken apart.
(I have personal experience on the value of an integration authority when helping design and implement a new governance framework for the seaworthiness of a 50,000 strong maritime enterprise in Australia.)
⁃ Legal and accounting systems are too deterministic in their management of risk and drive for profit. Systemic leadership in a TUNA world must challenge everything. (Perhaps invoking lessons from T5 Agreement and Project discussed in Part 2.)
⁃ Safety is seen as an engineering or technology issue rather than a cultural or social issue. (Harks to Professor Cormican’s call that the biggest challenges are in the ‘socio’ part of complex socio-technical programs.)
⁃ Little or no attention is given to the structure of governance early in a project, resulting in ill-defined boundaries of responsibility, authority and accountability, and a lack of alignment of purpose between actors. (This ties in well with the idea of integration early in any project – integration and governance go hand in hand.)
⁃ The structure of governance in most nations and cities does not align with the issues we face, as we witness for example failures in aged care, health, finance and education.
(I’m reminded of a study I co-led into the capacity and capability of the NZ Health System to respond to serious and unusual emergencies in 2004-05. Our clinical advisor – Dr Peter Roberts – was [then] head of intensive care at Wellington Hospital. His advice has stuck forever with me: “Bad health policy is more dangerous to my patients than the flesh-eating bug.” … it’s systemic and becomes entangled in complexity, and this holds true for all policy areas. It requires sound processes early for integration and governance.)
It wasn’t all bad news, as Professor Collins pointed to two global services - delivering air services and telecommunications services - where each has established “just enough” framework to enable national autonomy and global integration.
Each of these insights warrant attention if you’re looking for success in your socio-technical program. If you’re considering sustainability seriously as a long-term outcome, they’re indispensable and actionable.
A final note from Professor Collins: Logistics has a huge impact on sustainability. About 65% of the goods being transported around the world are in an unfinished state, typically being moved for integration in a place where labour is cheaper.
This little-known fact is rather frightening: it tells us that monetary efficiency in maximising for profit is the primary driver, not planetary and social efficacy. Too many jobs are piecemeal.
And yet, it’s an intriguing fact from a design perspective. I wonder, if you wanted to create more jobs with meaningful work for greater social cohesion, how would you set up your integration authority to reduce the logistics burden and increase sustainability? Worth playing with that…
As you do, watch to see how it helps you bring your enterprise into the phase of living within planetary limits. Watch also, to see whether proponents of the dominant growth paradigm push for efficiency for the enterprise over efficacy for the planet. How will you respond?
Maybe you’ll need to expand in other ways, too… so onto our last tack to come home with a ‘spinnaker run’.
Photo by Daniel Stenholm on Unsplash
Tack 7: Expanding Options by Expanding Your Methodological Approaches
Mike Jackson, Emeritus Professor, Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, challenged us to develop a multi-perspectival approach, and broaden the “somewhat mechanistic” ways that can dominate western thinking.
He was of course talking to a forum of systems engineers from around the world, but he could equally have been delivering the same message to any business school or management forum.
Professor Jackson opened by suggesting we needed a “radical re-orienteering of mindset,” so he challenged us with four views on complexity**
1. Ontological complexity challenges us to understand the real world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
2. Cognitive complexity challenges us with the different ways in which the real world is viewed. Remembering Humberto Maturana said, “we don’t perceive the world we see. We see the world we perceive.” Our cognition shapes us.
3. Restricted complexity enables us to conduct modelling with the bounds of our classical ways of knowing.
[There’s a lot of modelling done in systems engineering, which some might say gives us clarity. Others, useful insight. And yet some suggest models are “dangerous because they give you false confidence” [4]. I’d prefer to say the enquirer needs to be clear on their context and the boundaries of the system of interest being modelled.]
4. General complexity, which resists universal truths, wherein we find new emergence in the real-world which is not approachable with old ways of knowing, thinking, deciding and learning.
To be clear, Professor Jackson did not suggest these were the only four views of complexity, rather he used these as a framework from which to offer a multi-perspectival approach of five different ways of gaining insight towards develop pragmatic action.
The following five approaches work individually and collectively.
Mechanistic: Our dominant western thought processes are replete with mechanistic perspectives breaking problems down, solving for the parts. It’s fine for some parts of the world limited under our ‘microscope’ of restricted complexity.
While I’ve often decried the problems caused by reductionism and the deterministic biases many of our colleagues favour, I’m also conscious that without it we would not have nuclear medicine (for example) that gave my brother three extra years of life in his (now lost) battle with pancreatic cancer. So, we need some of it, necessarily, but far from sufficient if we are to engage with the general complexity of the real world.
Inter-relationships offer perspectives of the connections and communications among the parts in a mechanistic view. That’s rather helpful when it comes to integration. But it’s more than that, for inter-relationships ripple beyond the system of interest, to its role in a larger system and so forth, each of which is open to political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal, economic and ethical influences. We often close the circle of consideration for short-term convenience over long-term sustainabiility.
Organismic approaches offer perspectives on how to enable control and ingenuity. Beer’s Viable Systems Thinking is perhaps the most well-known, and I must say I’m a huge fan, for its application (with further development) into complex systems governance – a relatively new field of study in which I continue to collaborate with Professor Chuck Keating and his colleagues of Old Dominion University.
Purposeful approaches invite a thorough application of critical systems heuristics [5] and its boundary critique to explore the sources of motivation, control, knowledge and legitimacy; each of which invite questions of social roles, specific concerns and key problems – for the ‘involved’ and the ‘affected’. [Oh and watch out for the odd power struggle appearing.]
Societal / Environmental approaches are generally complex and thus invite us to shift from paradigmatic thinking to pragmatic action. We can’t plan our way through these. I’ll bring in a suggestion here from INCOSE Past President David Long that, as we think across scale, from micro to macro to global; we shift our thinking from interfaces to interactions to interests, to shift our focus from solutions to innovations to problematic situations. Dave Snowden’s estuarine mapping operates in this space too, considering the energy it takes to shift vs. the impact of the change.
In summary, Professor Jackson encouraged us to take multi-perspectival approaches to extend our capacity to constantly change our cognition to fit with a changing world.
He left us with the question: “What’s the breakthrough we need?”
Professor Jackson asked this in relation to improving the uptake of systems thinking and practice. It’s a great field of ideas and methodologies to bring, along with the same question, to our growth vs. degrowth considerations. What’s the breakthrough we need?
I sense the answer lies within a boundary critique growth vs degrowth. The hardest issue of all perhaps is alignment on the sources of motivation, control, knowledge and legitimacy. It’s not about the terms themselves – growth vs. degrowth.
For, as Erin Remblance notes:
“The term 'degrowth' is disruptive, provocative and a 'missile' word: it is trying to disrupt the status quo. It is honest and can't be co-opted. If people think growth is good and by extension degrowth is bad, then people don't understand how harmful further economic growth is. Changing the word would be solving for the wrong variable.” [1]
The ‘Global North’ talks much an international order of the rule of law, which they mean to apply to the ‘Global South’, while themselves remaining carefree about ignoring it. While one continues to grow economically, Nature shrinks. Genuine progress retreats.
It’s the greatest inequality, and we will need to shift ways of knowing, thinking, deciding and learning to see genuine progress more equitably.
A Closing Note
The International Council on Systems Engineering INCOSE is doing much to lift the sights of systems engineers and our profession to the challenges of global sustainability. The conference in Dublin was just the latest opportunity to meet people with high curiosity and a learning mindset who invite challenge while seeking practical perspectives on making progress.
I’ve endeavoured to capture my thoughts stimulated by people at the conference, and in the month since. I do look forward to the next International Symposium I’m able to attend (2026).
I’d like to give the final words for this essay to Dr Dan O’Neill and Professor Jason Hickel:
“Growth has been used to avoid addressing inequality (if there is growth, there is hope), but addressing inequality can also be a way to release ourselves from growth, and a much better option for society and the environment."
Dr. Dan O'Neill, EU Beyond Growth Conference, 2023
And this from Professor Jason Hickel, author of “The Divide – A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions” who recently wrote on social media platform X:
“We cannot continue to live in such a world. The double standards are obscene and intolerable. It dehumanizes all of us. But the lesson we must take from Gaza is that moral progress and the realization of human rights will never come from the ruling classes of the imperial core. The vision of universal values will never be a gift from Western elites. It was articulated by working class movements and in the crucible of anti-colonial struggle, by people who insisted that rights are for all and not just for a few.” [6]
~~~
Final Question:
How will we grow well together as an integrated diversity on Earth?
~~~
Let’s keep the growth vs degrowth conversation going. It seems we’ve only gotten started. I welcome your comments and suggestions.
With best wishes,
Richard
~~~
References
[1] Erin Remblance, Introduction to Degrowth, published on Substack 06 June 2024: https://erinremblance.substack.com/p/introduction-to-degrowth-5c0
[2] Gregg Henriques, “John Vervaeke’s Brilliant 4P/3R Metatheory of Cognition -
John Vervaeke finally answers what we mean by "cognition."” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/theory-knowledge/202101/john-vervaeke-s-brilliant-4p3r-metatheory-cognition 7 January 2021.
[3] Engineering X Case Studies. https://raeng.org.uk/news/new-engineering-x-case-studies-spotlight-good-and-bad-safety-practice-for-complex-systems
[4] Dave Snowden, “Risk, Uncertainty and Complexity Science” Keynote address to INCOSEIS, 3 July 2024
[5] For a description and analysis of Critical Systems Heuristics and the boundary categories and questions, see Chapter 18 of Michael C. Jackson “Critical Systems Thinking and the Management of Complexity” Wiley, Chichester UK, 2019
[6] Jason Hickel, Professor at ICTA-UAB, Visiting Senior Fellow at London School of Economics, Post on X, https://x.com/jasonhickel/status/1813310553169006772?s=61