Extended Environments
Sustainability through digitization

(building on policy and technology research originally published for Architects of Positive Futures)

An integrated approach

Extended environments, comprise of interconnected human and digital resources. Beyond traditional value-chains, sustainability strategies shift the focus to toward net positive outcomes and responsible communications across a wider ecosystem.

The challenge is in integrating sustainable resilience into risk processes, experience design, purpose statements, and long-term strategies.

While Environmental, Social and Governance regulation and incentivization is intensifying, in reality, exposure calculation is complex. There is a distinct lack of standard practices, and limited agreement on common calculations and core metrics to track progress. There are common themes across operational risk, digital resilience and sustainability, yet these disciplines remain largely disconnected.

Well intentioned mandates in both public and private sectors can have severe downstream impacts on economics and social processes. Detailed analysis and holistic views incorporate and secure the benefits of digitization, ensuring value is tangible and preserved into the future.

An integrated ESGD (Environmental, Social, Governance and Digitization) approach is evolving, and will undoubtedly evolve with new monikers. Far from media platitudes, digitization and emerging technologies can be seen as the most important drivers of sustainable resilience and circularity, and private and public domains are gradually evolving to interconnect ESGD goals. Interdisciplinary, holistic and technocratic approaches, not only protect against ill-conceived policy, but create an art of the possible arena for positive transformation.

The extended enterprise involves human and digital resources operating inside and outside of the traditional enterprise (source: 10Sphere)

Passive to Active Mode

By connecting ESGD goals, Sustainability objectives shift from an all too common passive policy implementation to an active policy implementation.

In passive mode, the focus is on awareness and adoption, with well-intentioned procedural guidelines and playbooks, and yet a lack of clear taxonomy, with specified control metrics and definitions that can be evidenced and objectively compared to standards and corrections. Values, policies and plans are defined, independent of economic impact; Reference libraries of measures comprise of non-standardized guidelines; and the overall sustainability operating model, operates in parallel to the public or private enterprise operating model.

In active mode, the focus is on taxonomy and measurement, integrated in real, networked operational settings and collaborative governance forums. Sustainability is aligned with operational settings; metrics are embedded and linked with economic impact and resilience; the overall sustainability operating model is tightly integrated with the public or private enterprise operating model, and in agile and holacratic settings.

By shifting to active policy mode, the power of digitization to support sustainability objectives is illuminated, exposing a raft of measures and impacts that can be effectively traced, tracked and predicted through analytics and scenarios.

Codifying Measures

Some reports suggest that sustainability represents a greater transformation than digitization; they are of course, highly interconnected. There is. however, an important difference between sustainable technology and sustainability through technology.

Taking as an example, the earth's glacier behavior. There is no shortage in commentary advocating quite dramatic public and private sectors changes to tackle the threat from diminishing glaciers, based on their role in the stability of earth’s habitable environment. There is less active engagement in the technologies that continuously examine and mitigate against this. These include remote sensing through GIS and autonomous drones, laser techniques that measure photonic changes within glaciers, AI capabilities that can model glacier behavior and scenarios, and terraforming techniques to preserve, modify and even create glaciers. This abstract, yet topical example is of course, the tip of the iceberg! As we drill down to many other areas of concern in sustainability, a comparable pattern emerges, with digitization and advanced information technologies  providing insight and resolution.

Questions for Policy in the Extended Environment :

• How is sustainability built into risk models and advanced analytics ?
• What is expected of services, investments and assets, and how will reputation be affected ?
• How is IT capacity and energy consumption correlated in a multi-cloud environment ?
• How well do we understand the lifecycle of digital artifacts and information production ?
• How is information used in long-range decision making ?
• Are we optimizing re-use in all processes ?
• Are we innovating responsibly and ethically ?
• How are all physical materials we interact with sourced and engineered ?
• Are we connected with the right communities to support continuous iteration ?
  
  

Author: Ivan Sean, c. 2019-2022 | USA
© 10 Sensor Foresight

Period: 2019-2022 | Language: English
Core Concepts: Active Policy; Extended Individual, Teams & Ecosystems
AI-Usage: Non-generative digital platforms, output validation
Conflict of Interest: None
References: 'Resilience Reset', Architects of Positive Futures Key Note Talk, Asia-Pacific, 2019 | 'The Extended Environment', Architects of Positive Futures Key Note Talk, Europe 2022