
Find a sustainability North Star
Humankind is pushing earth systems and natural resources to their limits. Business strategies must meaningfully, positively, decisively, and transformatively deliver sustainability impacts. By Engela Duvenage.
Business practices are costing the earth’s natural and socio-economic systems dearly, according to David Farrell, chief executive officer of Blue North Sustainability.
The Great Acceleration since the 1950s has seen growth in the world population, urbanisation, real GDP, foreign direct investment, transport, telecommunications, and international tourism.
However, humans use more fertilisers, water and energy, and catch more marine fish. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane have risen to the extreme, as have coastal nitrogen levels, surface temperatures, and ocean acidification. Vast stretches of tropical forest have been lost while terrestrial biosphere degradation continues.
According to the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, six of the nine so-called planetary boundaries had been crossed by 2024. These include biosphere integrity, climate change, biogeochemical flows, and freshwater and land-system change.
“We don’t fully understand what will happen to our planet as these boundaries are breached and tipping points reached,” Farrell pointed out. “We are stepping into very dangerous territory and are facing a significant challenge to our ongoing sustainability.”
Not all change is an improvement
Farrell wants business leaders to fundamentally change how they do business, develop strategies, and make decisions so that their enterprises may contribute meaningfully to reducing risk, improving well-being, and ensuring a better future for all.
While change is desperately needed, Farrell stated that it is critical to heed the warning of Dr Eli Goldratt, the founding father of the Theory of Constraints, that “all improvement is a change, but not all change is an improvement”.
Businesses should be discerning whether the implemented changes provide benefits or improvements. Some changes could have no impact or, at worst, accelerate and compound problems.
To this end, business leaders must first understand whether their thinking and (often unchallenged) assumptions are guided by a strong or a weak sustainability paradigm.
A weak sustainability paradigm dominates the current worldview, underpinning modern economic theory and businesses’ views of their societal role and place in the biosphere. Businesses follow their own set of rules, seemingly disconnected from nature. They rely on human ingenuity and breakthrough technologies to solve all problems, while nature is not seen as constraining progress.
According to Farrell, a strong sustainability worldview correctly understands that the economy is a subsystem of the biosphere and subject to natural laws and limits.
“It understands that the ultimate constraints to economic and societal progress are ecological,” said Farrell. “Consequently, there is a great need to moderate our businesses and economic activities to live within Planet Earth’s carrying capacity — a concept farmers understand well.”
He suggested that business leaders evaluate their sustainability strategies based on whether they tend to make changes reactively or proactively. Reactivity is a defensive, outside-in response to pressures for change, whereas proactivity is an inside-out management and leadership approach.
Five sustainability world views
The parameters of strong or weak sustainability and reactive or proactive attitudes to change can inform a simple yet powerful two-by-two matrix to guide businesses in evaluating and developing sustainability strategies, explained Farrell.
Strategies rooted in weak sustainability do not challenge business as usual. Only thinking inspired by strong sustainability allows businesses to embrace more fundamental changes towards business unusual.
Depending on where they fit in the sustainability matrix, businesses can be characterised as denialists, pragmatists, celebrities, lone stars, or transformers. The latter four accept that change is necessary, while denialists ignore possible problems or their role in creating them—they have a leave-business-alone attitude.
Pragmatists, driven by reactivity and a weak sustainability view, emphasise compliance in a bid to defend their market share.
“Their strategy is not about redesigning or rethinking how they farm or run their logistics, but about business as usual, unchallenged. There’s tinkering on the edges just to make sure that the right boxes are ticked,” said Farrell.
Celebrity businesses lead proactively, yet their business strategies and brands remain rooted in weak sustainability, with limited or no fundamental change. Their bold public announcements and commitments about, for instance, being greener or net zero are essentially to ensure greater market access and revenue growth.
“Their worldview is business as usual, only with a veneer of respectability,” commented Farrell.
Lone stars, the fourth category, are guided by strong sustainability but are more reactive than proactive. They see themselves as part of a greater ecosystem. Moving off-grid, being self-sufficient and independent (therefore “business unusual”) is about looking after themselves and their direct ecosystem. Their actions, therefore, do not influence broader societal change.
Transforming our world
In contrast to the other four business types, transformers are guided by strong sustainability and are motivated to drive proactive business and societal transformation. These catalysts and pioneers want to inspire societal change and lead by example. They redesign their businesses to operate within planetary limits and pursue ecosystem regeneration.
“Their core products and processes are radically innovative,” said Farrell. “They realise that we are in this mess because of how business was done in the past.”
Business leaders should carefully consider their aspirations and where their businesses stand.
“There is no shame in saying that you are a pragmatist or even a denialist,” said Farrell. “It is more important to aspire to move towards the transformer quadrant. At least you have put the marker there — your North Star — and are developing strategies with that end clearly in view.
“We must not only narrowly make economic sense of the world but see it in terms of the bigger ecosystems we depend on.”
Farrell believes that greater ecological literacy, embracing and integrating concepts such as stewardship, regenerative farming, and long-term timeframes help build a whole-systems planning approach.
“We need humility, gratitude, and a sense of wonder about the wonderful world we live in and depend upon fully for our existence,” he closed.
Watch Farrell’s presentation on the Hortgro YouTube channel.