Systems Thinking and the Environment: An Interview with Frederic Vester

Novel insights from a biologist, business professor, and systems thinker As private citizens, few managers would dispute the validity of a concern for the environment, but many business still perceive it as an inconvenience -- even a liability. Restrictions on the use of raw materials and the disposal of waste may, for instance, limit a company's freedom to maneuver and add to its operating costs. The successful company of the future, however, cannot operate in isolation from the community around it. Like a biological organism, it is part of a system whose complex interrelationships help sustain its survival. Only by understanding and nurturing these links will it prosper. But before an awareness of environmental issues can, as Professor Vester suggests, help a business create innovative products and build new markets for them, such issues must be consistently treated as an important factor in strategic planning. McKinsey: What is your approach to environmental work? Vester: The first thing I would say is that you can never separate environmental issues from the other parts of a business. Ecology means that an individual and an industry belong to the same ecosystem. The moment you separate things out -- here is ecology, this is nature, that is industry -- there is a risk of harming nature when you are trying to protect it. But if you are part of the same ecological system, you can pick up the feedbacks. You are a member, not a master. Second, I think we can only get people to behave in an ecological way -- compatible with nature -- when we give up the idea of making sacrifices and being ascetic. Egoism is one of the strongest forces in the living world. We should appreciate what is important to people -- money or whatever -- and use this understanding to make reasonable behavior seem more appealing than unreasonable. Achieve that, and people will change. I see the ecosystem as an organism. I am a biologist; I worked for twenty years in cancer research, where I tried to find analogies. I discovered that what you see in a cell is also in the whole organism, and what you see there is also present in a firm. The same principle applies in bigger organisms too, like towns or countries. If such an organism is not working, the first priority is to establish a good communications system. Take cancer cells: they do not obey signals from the organism, but if you can re-establish the connections through immunology, everything works again. Some people behave like tumors. They forget that success for them will eventually mean suicide. When they destroy the host organism, they die along with it. Part of my work is to make people aware that they are members of the ecosystem. Using your metaphor, is the host organism still sane and healthy? More and more we hear ecologists -- and now even business leaders -- saying that they doubt it. I think the organism is in wonderful order. If our species continues to disturb this order, it is us who will be thrown out, we who will disappear. In ecology, this succession of the species happens all the time. If a species becomes dominant, it can stay that way so long as it is aligned with the rest of the system. But the moment the species transforms its environment -- changes the conditions that made it dominant in the first place -- it will lose its dominance, and another will take its place. This is a kind of appeal to egoism. Our task is to save not nature, but ourselves. We should be aware that nature is powerful, and could reject us by viruses or epidemics or climatic change or whatever, feedbacks from our own behavior. If we choose to deal with nature, we can stay in the game; if not, we will be thrown out. Nature will change, but it will survive, whatever happens. How do you control human egoism in a practical way so that on the one hand, consumers do not have to sacrifice anything, and on the other, what they do is good for the environment? …