Page 387 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

362 C h a p t er T w enty

perhaps meaningless, to study industrial systems in isolation. The
need to draw appropriate system boundaries is a barrier to complex
systems modeling; for example, one impediment to the Kyoto Pro-
tocol is the potential for carbon “leakage” across borders due to
economic imbalances between participating countries. Apart from
connectivity and complexity, another barrier is the high degree of
uncertainty that is inherent in large-scale complex systems. The tur-
bulence of natural, political, and economic forces exceeds our ability
to predict the outcomes of our actions with any confidence. Who
could have anticipated the sequence of events that swept through
the United States in the early twenty-first century, including the Sep-
tember 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the devastation of
Hurricane Katrina, and the economic collapse of 2008? Plans for sus-
tainable growth need to be based on assumptions about the future,
but assumptions are often dead on arrival. In a time of turbulence
and discontinuity, old business models based on precision, stability,
and repeatable processes are no longer viable.

Toward Resilient Enterprise Systems
A number of multinational companies are trying to incorporate a
broader systems perspective into their enterprise risk management
programs. However, the traditional risk management approach is
predicated on identifying threats and reducing their likelihoods or
consequences. It is not effective for dealing with obscure threats that
are difficult to anticipate and quantify. Faced with a dynamic and
unpredictable business environment, some companies have aban-
doned traditional approaches to risk management and strategic plan-
ning in favor of a more flexible, resilient approach [10]. Enterprise
resilience can be defined as the capacity for an enterprise to survive,
adapt, and grow in the face of turbulent change. According to the Council
on Competitiveness, innovation, enterprise resilience, and sustain-
ability are the three cornerstones of economic competitiveness and
value creation [11].
Enterprises need to grow, just as natural organisms do, and the
concept of a static, no-growth enterprise is unrealistic in the business
world. Enterprises can learn much from
natural ecosystems, in which individual crea-
RESILIENCE WILL ENABLE
tures and entire species are engaged in a
ENTERPRISES TO REMAIN
constant struggle for food, security, survival,
COMPETITIVE AND
and growth. In a complex, connected, and
ACHIEVE THEIR LONG-TERM
uncertain world, resilience is a fundamental
SUSTAINABILITY GOALS.
attribute that enables both biological and
human systems to cope successfully with
continual waves of change. Resilience can be seen in many contexts—
in forests and wetlands that recover from devastation, in cities that