Page 390 - Design for Environment A Guide to Sustainable Product Development

Sustainability and Resilience 365

is a deliberate intervention within a complex set of relationships.
Companies that wish to ensure their long-term resilience must reach
beyond their own boundaries, develop an understanding of the
intricate systems in which they participate, and strive for continu-
ous innovation and renewal. In this broader playing field, the rules
are different: strategic adaptation becomes more important than
strategic planning, and decision makers need to embrace uncertainty
rather than try to eliminate it [14].
Finally, enterprise resilience operates at different time scales.
Short-term resilience involves coping with sudden disruptions in real
time to assure safety, security, and business continuity. Because of
competitive pressures, redundant capacity is not a viable approach,
so resilient enterprises need to develop operations that are both
lean and agile. In contrast, long-term resilience involves pursuing
competitive strategies that anticipate emerging changes in technolo-
gies and markets. Such foresight may be the key to assuring enter-
prise sustainability in the face of external pressures such as global
climate change. In fact, while much attention has been give to climate
change mitigation through carbon emission reduction, an equally
important issue is adaptation to the emerging impacts of climate
change, including sea level rise and habitat alteration, which are
already being felt around the globe [15].
Returning to the practical challenges of DFE, it will be difficult
for product development teams to incorporate systems thinking
and resilience concepts without appropriate metrics and analytical
tools. However, anticipating the implications of a design change
in terms of secondary impacts on natural and social systems will
require a level of analysis that is not readily available today. Inte-
grated assessment of sustainable systems cannot be accomplished
by simply linking together a collection of domain-specific models.
To understand the higher-order interactions among interdependent
systems will require new tools to capture emergent behaviors
and dynamic relationships in complex systems. As discussed in
Chapter 9, a number of multidisciplinary groups around the world
are developing such tools, and some companies have begun pilot
applications. The next phase of the journey is just beginning.