Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

Be Careful What You Wish For

Having spent a good deal of time reviewing countless articles on industrial symbiosis, the circular economy and everything in between, I have come up with one overarching reaction which is: Be careful what you wish for.

It is challenging to take even a modestly critical view of what are important ideas and initiatives in our effort to alter our industrial framework to reduce the effects of climate change and other deleterious impacts on the environment. My defense is to quote Aristotle in saying, we should try to follow the "Golden Mean" - everything in moderation.

In this case, this is more an admonition to think carefully about what we are doing and not simply jump into action without considering fully the implications of our efforts. We obviously cannot afford to be inactive. However, we should try not to rush into unthoughtful action allowing our enthusiasm to get us into other - though different predicaments.

The Many Responses to Global Warming

There are many different individual and organized responses to Global Warming. Each individual, country or group of countries (in the case of the EU) has its own approach. This post describes a number of them.

The individual responses are equal to the number of people on the planet. For purposes of this article, I will capture many of these reactions on the part of those remaining inactive in the representative figure of a very intelligent friend of mine. This person who says whether Global Warming is happening or not, humans did not cause it. The idea here is let's just get on with life as it is and hopefully a decent life. The conscious and unconscious motivations for such an approach vary.

Sadly, this is not the extreme point on the side of inaction. The extreme point is represented by the current President of the United States and his business and political allies. This approach is to deliberately oppose and obstruct action to respond to Global Warming and to support the fossil fuel industry.

There are a variety of approaches where people and groups are taking action though in different ways to respond to the challenges of Global Warming. This post will describe some key ones.

Sustainability and Human Evolution

Are human beings, H. sapiens, genetically disposed to being unsustainable in the current ecological situation of our planet? This is a question raised by William Rees in a 2010 article, "What's blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition and denial."

Strategies for Responding to Climate Change, the Climate Crisis, the Climate Emergency

There appear to be three main strategies for attempting to motivate citizens to take action on climate change. The terminology by which this state of affairs is referred to is beginning to reflect the essence of the different strategies - Climate Change, Climate Crisis, Climate Emergency, a Decarbonized World.

One strategy is to scare the hell out of people in motivating them to take action. This is currently reflected by Greta and previously by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. This approach has been directed to both leaders and citizens. One benefit of this "scare-the-hell-out-of-them" approach is that it educates people on the severity of the real situation as presented by climate data and observation. It attempts to get this issue into the current political discussion. Education can be included here as a subset of the overall strategy. Being educated as to the reality of climate change should scare the hell out of people. Many campaigns to involve people have education as a key objective.

Integrating Ecosystem and Value Chain Design in Sustainability Efforts, Revisited

How can one use the practice of design to implement sustainability approaches in organizations and in their surrounding ecosystems?

This is a daunting challenge especially with regard to ecosystems because the ecosystem of even a small polluter can be inhabitants of the entire planet or certainly a region of the globe.

One really needs to take a whole-earth perspective to fully comprehend this. This is vividly demonstrated in the recent "school-strike" catalyzed by Greta Thunberg of Sweden which involved 1.6 million young people in almost 1700 cities and towns in over 123 countries in every continent.

We do have to start somewhere in terms of organizations and one place to start is to gain a concept of the system with which we are dealing. This involves viewing the organization in terms of what may be a more linear, value-chain as well as seeing the organization as part of a larger ecosystem.

Integrating Ecosystem and Value Chain Design in Sustainability Efforts

There are several important questions with regard to using design to improve sustainability in organizations. The first is how does one take a large-scale ecosystem perspective to design while also maintaining a more detailed, linear value chain perspective. The second is what role does the customer journey and experience play regarding these two perspectives especially in large systems. This post looks at both of these.

Ecosystem Members Co-creating Designs

I have been expressing the idea in previous posts that in an ecosystem, knowledge and skills are continually exchanged by members of the ecosystem in the process of ongoing value co-creation. In this article, I will apply this to designing in ecosystems.

Lately, I have read some academic articles that talk about extending this process of value co-creation to participative, redesign efforts in an ecosystem. As Lucy Kimbell from the University of Oxford states, design can be a distributed social effort in which the role of a central designer is not privileged. In this view, design is carried out by professional designers and by end-users and others. (Kimbell, 2011, 2012). In practice, this could include members of the HR organization.

Touch Points and Deliberations: Cal Pava Meets the 21st Century

What does Cal Pava's groundbreaking work on Deliberations in organization redesign have to tell us about analyzing touch points along the customer journey as part of a design process? Are there other contemporary models that can be illuminating in analyzing touch points in the process of design?

This article will review these models and then arrive at practical and theoretically sound questions that can be used as a basis for analyzing and redesigning touch points as part of a customer journey and the surrounding ecosystem of value co-creation. This falls within the approach that I have been describing in previous posts about adaptive design for collaborative ecosystems.

Adaptive Design For Collaborative Ecosystems

This article sets out a working description of a collaborative ecosystem in which value is co-created. It describes what needs to be attended to in the process of adaptive design for the ecosystem. It sets out a path forward in pursuing adaptive design for a collaborative ecosystem.

Are you an Ecosystem?

Being an ecosystem involves recognizing all those engaged in the co-creation of value and in ongoing relationships with one another constituting a larger network. This is qualitatively different from seeing your organization plus all of the business relationships it has with its different providers and stakeholders. It is different from seeing your customer or client as the recipient of the goods or services that you develop.

Discovering the Ecosystem Within: An Approach to Design

The great irony with regard to business ecosystems is that businesses are not organized as ecosystems while at the same time they are ecosystems. All of the components of an ecosystem may already be resident in and about the organization while at the same time not being recognized as such. This post describes the phenomena and then takes a step toward addressing how to intervene to bring the ecosystem into ascendance.

Let's look for some of the attributes of an ecosystem in the contemporary organization. They exist in various stages of development.