Sustainability Calling: Underpinning Technologies

By Pierre Massotte and Patrick Corsi

This book discusses the key concepts of the technologies that underpin the drive towards sustainability in today’s complex world.  The authors propose an integrated view of the frontiers facing any organization nowadays – whether an enterprise, an administration or any human collective construction – that operates with a goal, a mission or an objective.

While a unified approach still seems unachievable, the authors have nevertheless tackled the amalgamation of the underpinning elements (theories, domains of expertise and practice) and propose a model for assimilating the new concepts with a global view to design the sustainable organizations of the future. The book paves a way towards a general convergence theory, which will manifest, as a by-product, genuine sustainability.   Furthermore, and due to the fact that the same main principles apply, the book redesigns the notion of “competitiveness”, which today is too often simply reduced to profitability.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781119145370

Book preview

Preface

Welcome to the land of overwhelming sustainability!

Within a few years, sustainable development has been raised to global status on an exponential scale, which has caught major international media headlines by storm and has made it part of the top political agenda at world summits. In fact, thoroughly encompassing industry and economy, the climate and the Earth’s resources are subtly impacting the livelihoods of both the rich and the poor. Here is a concept of a radically new type which mankind, despite its exalted prowess at long solving problems, now finds itself powerless to address suitably even to define with sagacity, insight and perhaps enlightenment. What does the concept of sustainability mean?

An encounter of a pernicious kind lurks in the face of man and the planet. Evidence shows an issue addressed by a whole range of hard to tackle complexities for mankind. Not really specific, the unfavorable regions of the world, everywhere and everyday impact each living being globally.

Has mankind ever encountered such a compelling affair? The call of sustainability is general and the sustainability imperative is inescapable and insuppressible. The term sustainability is universal and applies everywhere: business, non-governmental organizations, administration, cities, industry, individuals, any living being, etc.

How can we address the concept of sustainability?

Sustainable development is a subject of subjects: embracing many disciplines and at the same time transcending them, spanning man’s activities as well as the planet’s processes. Sustainability relates both to our external environment and to our intrinsic person as well. Being happy and feeling comfortable resorts to our sustainability. Preserving and growing our environment is a sustainable action.

The authors have taken a collection of questions and each chapter answers them. Here is a glimpse of what is to come:

– What do we mean by sustainability?

– What are the most critical sustainability challenges and factors facing us in this century?

– What are the underlying mechanisms of our complex systems?

– How can the fields of physics, natural and social sciences, life sciences, humanities, and technology interact to contribute to better understand these mechanisms and help in defining their solution?

– How do we balance the needs and desires of current generations with the needs of future generations?

– In nature and our environment, how do we combine the ambivalences and antagonistic properties to find the best attractors and equilibriums to get the best sustainability?

However, the most authentic question is to define how we can implement a sustainable development to improve our human well-being while preserving the resources and assets of our Earth such as: energy, air, water, food, and the survival of the climate and ecosystems. The central tenet of this book is that sustainable development can be done simultaneously by combining different theories, sciences and technologies.

In general, we humans tend not to easily perceive the underpinning critical and core problems; this is arguably because humanity is facing a huge and complex system: the livelihood on planet Earth. The difficulty will not consist of processing the effects of any non-sustainable system but of defining the underlying mechanisms and causes. That is the only viable way to address the present and future challenges of this century.

What strategy, approach and discipline should we follow when faced with a global sustainability issue or challenge? The aim of this book is to explain the various mechanisms behind the concept, to foster our critical thinking and analysis of complex situations and to bring out new paradigms based on the integration of well-known advances in several border sciences and theories. Many examples and application fields will be described to get practical and useful advice, simple ideas and best practices. Throughout the chapters, the authors do not mythically substitute technology for man, yet position technology in synergetic coordination with man, having themselves participated in numerous technological developments over the past half a century within large corporations, such as IBM, which several examples will be drawn from.

This book is structured into two volumes and seeds a number of previously disparate basic roots, each hopefully having a profound say on the subject matter of sustainability, when actually put in conjunction with others. Most of the shared scientific elements are already proven and some are not fully uncovered yet. The view is to lighten the unknown spaces so that a new consciousness may emerge that takes in all the seeds and can support, by design, novel futures having that one desired property: to be sustainable. In terms of C-K theory, it aims that the things which were deemed impossible or unthinkable only a few years ago may come of age by design for the sustained benefit of our livelihood everywhere on the Planet Earth.

For the sake of commodity, this book focuses on the technologies underpinning sustainability, while the second book [MAS 15] wraps up the findings by unifying them and addresses organizational issues by providing the keys to operationalize a more global sustainability. In this volume, the search for models, and then the study of nature and life principles, originates and precedes the quest for the mechanisms of sustainability, forming a collection of novel technologies underpinning the operations of sustainable worlds. Technology is taken in its etymological sense of a miscellany of methods, processes, or techniques – more generally knowledge – that can be used for an objective: the making of a sustainable society. It aims at mobilizing the knowledge pertaining to such an objective. Perhaps that knowledge will someday be embedded in some kind of automata or computing device.

About the authors

To make a long story short, it was January 2010 when the authors, having already co-authored two previous books on linking decision-making and complexity sciences, embarked in discussions on "building adaptive and sustainable worlds" and began to discuss underpinning principles, models and possible approaches. After several attempts, the multilevel model from nano to macro was embodied and the keys to cross them emerged, which revisited many well-entrenched notions such as time, space, entropy, aging, survival and consciousness.

For Pierre Massotte (Higher Doctorate), this was the extension of career-long complexity projects piloting from IBM’s Montpellier plant in Southern France before being in charge of competitivity of Development laboratories and Manufacturing plants at IBM Europe. Pierre arguably led the biggest ever team on complexity issues locally and remotely, which peaked at one time at about 120 staff in places like IBM Europe, Pougkheepsie, NY, Yorktown Heights, NY, and later at ARMINES (R&D of Ecole des Mines). As one example, he was studying chaos and fractal factories in the real world of large computers manufacturing, hardware and software development, and complex organization re-engineering, at a time when nobody could imagine the possible links either between chaos and electronics, cooperation, competition and game theory, quantum physics and production control, or even between sustainability and entropy.

Dr. Patrick Corsi had his formative years right from Silicon Valley within IBM’s Research and Office Products Divisions since 1979 and then at the La Gaude plant near Nice in France. By quitting the company in 1984 with one idea in mind – the whole computing world going personal and IBM not listening too well – he pursued advanced artificial intelligence R&D projects while managing technology transfer from a start-up in Paris, then within the THOMSON (now Thales) Group, finally within the European Commission in Brussels. Today, he is specialized in designing breakthrough futures for firms and institutions, being an Associate Practitioner at Mines ParisTech.

Acknowledgments

We, the authors, are indebted to IBM Corp. for having walked the path of a unique company, a forerunner in complexity projects and a determined player in its way of deeply training and managing people. Pierre is also indebted to the School of Mines in Ales for participating in the reenginering of the education system, and technology transfer to Industry. The methodology orientation they deeply immersed themselves in, as well as the values which underpinned the moves, are probably the two special ingredients which enabled us to slowly produce this book. We also express our sincere and enduring thanks to the countless knowledgeable people we encountered along the way.

Introduction

Why Transformation Is the One Keyword

I.1. Where have we got by now?

Let us observe the environment around us for a moment. What do we observe?

For one, the current state of affairs in the world is not uniform: complexity arises from every corner and irresistibly requires from us a change in our way of thinking. The fact that everything is said to be complex relegates non-complex things into the realms of oblivion and they seem to no longer exist or are incredibly weak.

Thus, we acknowledge that the factors at hand that spell irrevocable change are hard to reach, or difficult to measure, and their understanding inherently resists an analytical approach. As a result, we tend to feel caught in a sort of nest that captures our past habits, yet at our own risk.

At the same time, new concepts and opportunities visibly emerge that signify new possibilities for those who would deliberately act upon new paradigms. Unsought complexity levels result as a consequence of evolution, and also possibly by chance as permanent mutations play their spontaneous role. And both evolution and chance are factors of diversity.

The emergence of new concepts is of great importance for our own living, our society and its environment. Everything evolves toward more complexity and new functionalities are offered to living systems through three main ways:

By changing scale on a material plane: our society investigated the microscale over the last century and by now reached the nanoscale, which signifies offering new possibilities. The same phenomenon happened in the software development process, whose concepts always evolved and gave way to new applications, for instance due to reconfigurable and fault-tolerant pieces of code in a more global application.

By developing pluridisciplinary approaches and by transposing the discoveries made in biology, physics and genetics toward other activity sectors. In this way, innovative solution fields were opened.

By introducing new problem solving and design ways. For instance, within Nature, optimization is obtained through continuous back-and-forth trials, global convergence based on local equilibriums, and harmony between interactions, within complex and evolving networks.

Our issue is putting these new paradigms into use and co-evolving with them. This is the main subject of this book.

I.2. What evolution forward?

Society is changing, certainly due to technological evolution. In this respect, we can confidently assume that the following evolution will happen over time and soon (Figure I.1).

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Figure I.1. Technological evolution is unstoppable [MAS 14]

This diagram starts with on-premise equipment and plots the evolution toward a Mind-to-Mind environment (which it expresses by the term NoMatter-to-NoMatter). Hence, the questions: are the interconnected levels leading to a unified model? What is the level of complexity gained at each new level of the evolution? And what is the impact on sustainability?

We are still learning how to look at this 21st Century with more appropriate models. The US National Science Foundation attempts at developing funding mechanisms which are common in nature and aim to improve our way of thinking and acting, with an orientation toward sustainability. It defines its key transformative research concept as follows:

"Transformative research involves ideas, discoveries, or tools that radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept or educational practice or leads to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science, engineering, or education. Such research challenges current understanding or provides pathways to new frontiers."

I.3. Tackling transformation is the job

We never found the right time and enough time, when seeking a balance to the world: this has never be placed above the priorities and general interest of human beings. Balance that places humanity in harmony with its full environment obviously involves nature, as well as economic, competitive, societal and personal realms. Without necessarily granting anything for free, it is possible to make true gifts to each other. That is awakening now on a global dimension. It renders man complete. This therefore raises some questions:

– Why have we not collectively been able to redress our economic and financial systems to the point of certain sustainability yet?

– Why are many disruptions still lurking behind our back, ready to stifle our policy efforts?

– How long more are we going to repeat the past? The past has become a narrow game; it restricts and individualizes all (e.g. earnings).

– The human journey needs searching for a new vision, a new goal, a new thinking, a new attitude and a new culture. So, how do we do all that?

To answer such questions, we have to rethink our vision of the world: the world is becoming ever more interconnected and unpredictable. Its correlated constraints are complexity and uncertainty. These create global economic, technological, political and environmental turbulences and crises. Within this context, decision-makers and managers are first hindered in their efforts to exit any crisis, then, develop, operate and control innovative business models, future organizations and production systems, new ways of living, working, and … new societies.

On the contrary, collective actions, social networks, emergence and self-organizations are quite common within nature around us; yet, they are not fully embedded into our brain or our human generative mechanisms.

This book is intended to prepare minds with a new mode of thinking toward a new conceptuality. It brings about a new way to position organizations and to relate them with each other. In order to achieve this goal, we can refer to basic mechanisms as used in nature and to main principles such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

For the above reason, we have introduced new paradigms, such as "φ-design and G-organizations. The term φ-design comes from the ancient Greek culture: φύση = Physi, meaning Nature. In the same way, G-organization is inspired by Gaïa = Gé", which relates to how everything is created, structured, organized and living on the Earth. Both approaches are complementary since they enable us to better understand and exploit the underlying principles managing the abilities of an interconnected individual, from the infinitely small up to the infinitely large scale.

With regard to the above statement, when a person speaks about "bio-inspired design", we can easily conclude that, compared with what we are commonly doing, it is an improvement. Yet, that is a too restrictive term, as it is not related to a global system enhancement or a global optimized process. Introducing such paradigms is akin to implementing transformative research, development and engineering. It is a multidisciplinary approach since the main advances are always resulting from borderline, often straddling two scientific, social or economic disciplines.

As a consequence, this book presents business, social, economic and political concepts/arguments, models and approaches that are believed to rebuild and enable a sustainable, equitable, social and economic setting. They are novel, free from past schemes and compelling enough to set our agendas with courage, poise and deliberate acumen toward improving the human condition on a sustainable planet – the Earth.

I.4. A summary of the book

In this book, dedicated to sustainability science, we propose an integrated view of current frontiers that may be faced by any organization – be it an enterprise, an administration or any human collective construction – that operates in a given environment, with a specific goal, mission or objective. What is striking is the magnitude and the speed at which the changes, of all types, have recently appeared. Frontiers are no longer gaps but walls.

A unified approach does not seem achievable yet: relevant modeling methodologies have to be either completed or reviewed; this would probably be a tantalizing undertaking by now. The authors have nevertheless tackled the amalgamation – and, to a partial extent, the merging – of the underpinning elements (theories, domains of expertise and of practice) and propose a resulting model for assimilating the new concepts with a global view to design the sustainable organizations of the future.

An originality of the book is that the authors consider constructive links between diverse theories and practices. Even if some are not mature yet, the readers already can extract some properties and characteristics and apply them in the real world: they show their relatedness and evidence a global coherency. The book paves the way toward a general convergence theory, which will manifest, as a by-product, genuine sustainability. The way sustainability is grasped in society and economy today is only partial and quite unsatisfactory, as well as it is neither coherent nor consistent in the sense of information theory.

Furthermore, and due to the fact that same main principles apply, the book redesigns the notion of "competitiveness". Traditional facets of competitiveness are quality, cost reduction and flexibilities (in volumes and in product specifications). Today, confusion sometimes pops up, competitiveness being often reduced to profitability.

As an example, some people say that only a swarming enterprise can intrinsically generate competitiveness, and that is from the inside. Indeed, this requires the blending of multidomains such as information theory, bio-inspired approaches, complexity sciences, networks theory and related social dynamics, scaling up and down from over macro designs down to under micro levels, etc.

As a result, we will be able to propose more efficient and effective solutions. We can also say that bio-inspired systems, or even bio-mimicry, are an enhancement in the design and development of sustainable systems. However, they already have their own limits and cannot once again bring a full and pertinent solution to our issues. We are living in an imperfect world and we have to proceed further in understanding the evolution in Nature, the oldest and most global existing system ever. This explains why it has become a necessity to get ahead in our inquisitive and prospective search and introduce the basic concepts owned by physical and other sciences.

The above considerations provide the rationale for this book.

I.5. What the present situation tells and the issues encountered

I.5.1. Foreword

In this introductory chapter, we take the opportunity to provide an update on issues raised by many project managers – some leading to the Project Management Institute (PMI) – working in the area of information systems and business intelligence. They are recurrently stating that their decision support systems (DSS) are, in the broad sense, continuously growing and creating more information ever (that is to say their related entropy is increasing); hence, they become difficult to control and manage. Here, we partly indicate to the issue of cloud computing, and in association with the notion of Big Data. In addition, those managers consider this phenomenon as irreversible due to technical advances that require all of us to move forward.

The latter assertion is questionable. It is both true and false because, as we will see later in the book, ambivalency is a concept that applies everywhere. Furthermore, in any engineering task that intends to develop a new product or an innovative service, sustainability has become the main factor to be considered for assessing the relevance of the human activity at hand. The purpose of a sustainable development refers to an economic or technological development which preserves the resources and the environment and makes them available to the future generations. The problem comes from the fact that while so many people invoke sustainability, they are but unable to find, through cloud-based data, the crowded or emerging expectations and needs of a population. They cannot measure or compare it to reference values.

As soon as no relevant data are available, it is of utmost importance to see in which direction progresses have to be done. In this example, the only way to evaluate and measure the sustainability of a system, and then its adequacy against new societal constraints, is to measure the Entropy Generation of the system [ROE 79]. It will be expressed either in a qualitative way (positive or negative) or through a variation ΔS (where S is the entropy of the system).

As a reminder, the generation of entropy in our society during the past few centuries of industrial era was mainly due to:

– consumption and waste of energy;

– irreversible use and destruction of limited raw materials and physical resources;

– increase of CO2, CH4, etc., and other gas of carbon, hydrogen oxygen, nitrogen (CHON) nature, emissions;

– social rejects due to the growing gap between Western and Third World countries, which lead to the decimation of whole tribes, cultural destructions, steady streams of refugees, etc., creating disorders and societal problems in terms of feeding, racism, greed attitudes, safety and security, etc.

In comparison, failing to speak as ideologist, we reckon how we still tend to think of ecology, and thus of preservation of Nature with the characteristics, albeit living on our so-called smart planet. Nature:

– runs on sunlight;

– uses only the energy it needs;

– fits form to function;

– recycles everything;

– rewards cooperation;

– banks on diversity;

– demands local expertise;

– curbs excesses from within;

– taps the power of limits.

Currently, many earth inhabitants make judgments about our industry, our economy and governance based or not on the above views, even if they sometimes contradict their philosophy. Just as a huge disequilibrium pops up between the real and the imaginary/ideal world, they seem not to perform a systemic analysis of the situation, e.g. a try-for-fit applied to human or economic development with 10 billion inhabitants. They appear to condemn a partial political decision which does not fit the above constraints. Inevitably, unworkable solutions are doomed to end up in trash or oblivion.

For the above reasons, and to better develop sustainable systems, it is essential to focus on some examples, to see how the concepts can be applied, to analyze the underlying mechanisms and to restore certain phenomena and characteristics of these systems. We will observe that around us, in Nature, as in our current life or in our information systems, some basic mechanisms are universal and we will be conducted to make certain transpositions, adaptations and transitions to get common driving rules and achieve a better system sustainability. Based on these facts, we then have an approach that makes a good understanding and consistent actions in our everyday affairs possible.

I.5.2. Distinguishing sustainability from resilience

In our discussions, confusion often arises between the so-called resilience – which is related to survivance or survival – and sustainability, and this requires some clarification.

As an application field, we could target a manufacturing plant, a financial, social, or cultural environment, or even a society as a whole: the process associated with the system has the same structure and the only factor that differs is the scale. Here, resilience is more than survival. It is the ability of a system to absorb a disturbance, to reorganize and to continue to function in the same way as before the occurrence of the disturbance.

Within this framework, the concept of resilience is different from the one commonly used. More specifically, resilience is considered as the capability to adapt to external events and required changes. This is the reason why we will adopt the precise definition formulated by Walker [WAL 90]:

The ability to absorb a disturbance or stimuli, then to reorganize and to continue to function in the same manner as before, with the same structure, the same identity and the same reactive capabilities.

As an example, let us consider a milk distribution company and focus on the milk marketing system. If the company buys milk on a market that has many different locations within a certain country and delivers its products in various plastic packaging, it becomes sensitive to a great number of events that it cannot control: agricultural policies, global milk currencies, oil prices, etc. The resilience of the production system – a survival aptitude – is directly impacted. Moreover, some packages and obsolete products would not be recycled; it is a situation that leads to pollution. In addition, recycling consumes some energy, and hence is not neutral. The company may decide to replace plastic by glass packaging, then to implement a die to reuse them and become more sustainable as less pollution gets generated.

If the company decides to buy from local farmers working together in a cooperative production or via legal contracts with the farmers, then it is gaining some resilience due to the partnership. When it decides to collect the empty glass bottles back for reuse, it improves its sustainability and also its resilience: the required volumes of bottles are met locally via a highly secure channel, since they are already manufactured.

Based on this example, we can state that resilience is related to a system’s inputs, which themselves depend on initial system’s resources, basic energies, subassemblies and components. More specifically, the resilience of a system strongly depends on the various disturbances of all the inputs.

Sustainability, which is a wider concept than resilience, is instead associated at the same time with the inputs and outputs of the system. For instance, sustainability concerns the environmental, social, political, economical, etc., consequences generated by the system.

I.6. A main concept: toward new ways of thinking

All these paradoxes show that we should draw our inspiration from another world. Our initial thinking focuses on the approaches developed by the ancient Greeks: due to our rationality, we keep looking for items, facts and causes which govern the design of a new world, the speed with which the system develops, the emergence of new concepts, etc.

For example, with regard to the environment, the Greeks considered that the original and mother elements in nature were water, air, earth, fire and aether. The aether, as in our current physical theories, allowed us to explain what remained unknown; it can be considered as rarefied, intangible and transparent substance which permeates any space, even between the particles of matter, and we need to describe its properties. It is able to bring out an emerging field, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field.

Today, the problem remains the same. As we will see in the following chapters, to better understand and explain the sustainability of a system, we need to introduce some ontologies, codes, undefined matters or energy, and underlying mechanisms that are able to reinforce the meanings and the foundations existing behind the term sustainability.

For instance, right now sustainability is a very often used word; however, we do not know how to measure such sustainability. We advocate that one way to learn about measuring the sustainability of our systems under development is to resort to the so-called entropy generation; the objective is to provide the society with reduced entropy generation systems.

That amounts to no fashionable trend or business opportunity whatsoever, since the future of all human beings is involved. It is a paradigm change, an ethics and awareness issue, and presupposes a set of drastic changes from standards, policies and practices in our own values, consciousness and way of life.

Similarly to what the ancient Greeks were thinking, we can state, with regard to our experience, that sustainability is driven by some specific codes. To drive and manage a system created and developed by human, we have identified the following codes, analogous to the five former elements that are able to unify the construction of the world (Figure I.2).

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Figure I.2. Five code types that underpin the environment

In this book, we will review these codes. We will study some of the underpinning aspects, mainly as related to the sustainability of information, information systems and decision-making in industrial systems. The study will be performed by linking these codes to, for example, the notions of time, quantum fluctuations and entropy. This is especially important considering that humanity grows its involvement in worldwide collaboration and while everything is interdependent and involves each of us too. This is of great importance to better define the concepts, methodologies and practices around sustainability by basing them on the development of more theoretical characteristics, even if we do not fully control or assimilate their impact on the real world yet. The information provided in this book is made accessible to anyone not familiar with physics through illustrative examples. This will surely avoid any theoretical and non-digestible demonstration.

I.7. Integrating the above theories into their context

The system sustainability concept is often linked to system complexity. In our mundane context, sustainability expresses the fact that responsible people are afraid of losing control of a complex phenomenon. This fact is also associated with the need to preserve a situation in the face of apparently irreversible change. Under these conditions, is sustainability a marketing trap? Or rather a real main concern? Considering what is happening in our world, we cannot tell yet, given that complexity is the normal evolution of nature.

What we do know, however, is that all the systems around us are now integrating some of these concepts into their design, engineering and development. Hereunder, we are only interested by the evolution of technologies implied in the decision and control of our industrial and economic systems. This is progressively done following the three steps below.

Step 1: extending the concepts presently used in information systems

Complexity is an invasive and not yet integrated concept, which requires a permanent adaptation of the DSS. Also, while social networks are developing, novel business analytics tools requiring the so-called NoSQL approaches remain unknown by 40% of firms. Presently, numerous research and development (R&D) organizations are trying to include complexity and networking sciences in their operations.

Such an integration is not often done satisfactorily since ambivalence is always required when managing systems. The latter statement involves the transdisciplinary skills attached to complexity theory (as studied in research laboratories) or operated in organization engineering (for enabling the transfer and application of theories to the real world), which leads us to elaborating strategies able to merge the different scientific and social advances originating from each theory and practice.

In Figure I.3, we define a global and advanced vision for gathering and linking together the different theories and technologies for solving production or sustainability problems. The resulting integration merges two different ways of thinking and highlights the progressive development observed in many associated sciences and technologies:

– In the first stage, two independent groups of disciplines were established and used independently: the scientific and the psycho-socio group. That was less than a century ago.

– In the second stage, the decision, control and management technologies evolved. In many technical systems, some new sciences and technologies that were created or developed independently of each other (such as cybernetics, systems theory and NLDS) were progressively applied. This happened during the past 50 years.

– Presently, a few closer relationships are being grown between different domains. Yet, our way of thinking has not changed. For instance, many decision-makers have not yet integrated the transition from on-premise to pure cloud, that is to say, from complexity to networking.

To better appraise and operate the complexity and sustainability of our systems, a full convergence of all disciplines involved will be required in the future. This last part of the graph can be dubbed convergence theory as it implies the working in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways with a view to integrate and assimilate the above-defined complementary sciences.

This was the very aim of the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) within IBM, which was devoted to the competitiveness of its European development and manufacturing centers during the 1990s. This is the only way to understand global challenges, prepare for paradigm changes and develop innovative and best-suited technologies. Today’s business intelligence technologies cover the matter in part, but through a too conventional approach based on quantitative and qualitative databases methods.

We should note that such a graph is an updated view of what we could consider as an integrative model of innovative theories and/or sciences. The reason is that it shows how the different theories have been progressively introduced and exercised in decision management and operational research. It is a general graph that can be used in any field as it becomes evermore difficult to elaborate a solution in an ever more complex environment. When problem solving leads to a dead end, we have to go and look elsewhere for solutions to the problem. Pluridisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are thus necessary for a more sustainable problem solving.

Unfortunately, based on our experience gained at IBM during the last three decades and the difficulties in sometimes getting consistent solutions, we had to extend our vision and develop the transposition and the development of concepts already well known in physics. We did so through European-funded projects, which required additional work for integrating them within production systems sciences. We have obtained a global framework, enabling us to process and challenge the sustainability issues of any system in a better way.

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Figure I.3. A global and advanced vision for gathering and linking together the different theories and technologies for solving production or sustainability problems

As said above, and keeping the graph in mind, we can develop some aspects and theories related to the sustainability, complexity and entropy concepts of any complex system. Sustainability is merely an emerging property resulting from the application of the above codes and theories, which already prevail in nature. This suggests new questions such as:

– In complex systems, are revolutionary properties emerging? If yes, how do we tune the concept of sustainable systems?

– In the monitoring and control field, are actual engineering technologies suitable for the design and development of sustainable systems?

Actually, too many questions remain to be answered in terms of consistency or matching sustainability requirements. What is used in nature could be different from what is expected or desired by policy makers, politicians or ideologists. This requires reconsidering the potentialities of this graph in more depth. What we can say is that any concept and approach has to be considered through the different codes as mentioned before. For instance, when a decision has to be taken, we cannot ignore that it is depending on physical conditions (i.e. code of matter), biological considerations (i.e. code of life), emotional and psychic concerns (i.e. code of thought), and social and intercations (i.e. code of complexity).

Step 2: a new and sustainability-oriented paradigm of theories and sciences

In the above step, we have seen the reasons why we need to go further and implement some missing components of the puzzle : they mainly consist of basic physics principles that are part of, for example, the so-called quantum physics, or entropy theory.

Such an evolution of the theory of organizations seems evident: by their outgrowth, all systems created in nature are based on similar basic principles. There would be little reason to stay away from new technology and science inputs, just because it remains difficult to understand and control them or because we only partially know them. Moreover, we are facing a cultural issue that hampers their implementation, as we tend to think in terms of a technology development paradigm. For us, deepening a science we are already skilled at is far easier (and a lot more comfortable) than looking for instabilities and permanently reconsidering our intellectual assets through transdisciplinary knowledge and know-how.

Step 3 : A new paradigm leading to the ‘whole sustainability’

Figure I.4 elaborates a new global representation of the concepts introduced in this book. In the five boxes located in lower part, and left side, of the graph, the domains marked in yellow (or the darker gray) generally cover what is commonly used to investigate a problem and find a solution (e.g. an algorithmic solution). In the blue domains, paradigmatic changes are already found, and some issues and topics are starting to be used in products and services. They emerge from concepts such as evolution and emergence theories, as encountered in bio-inspired approaches (form and pattern generation, adaptation mechanisms, etc.). The domains represented in white are known; yet they are not commonly taken into consideration in global and integrated design and sustainable approaches.

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Figure I.4. The interconnection of sciences and theories. For a color version of the figure, see www.iste.co.uk/massotte/sustainabilty1.zip

I.8. Application on an example relevant to entropy and network theory

Humanity succeeded in understanding how an ecosystem works, and in collecting the new expectations of a society. But is this not yesterday’s approach? The fact is that we are living within and through networks (telecommunications, social, etc.) in a global community which is rapidly changing and where everything is connected to a single biosphere, based on complementary modes of functioning. Modes and codes influence and alter our relationships to just anything: our ways of thinking and designing things or making smart systems. And that happens within all organizations and organisms, including industry. Moreover, Western countries have shifted from a duty society to more individualism, and now are moving to a new hedonism and eudemonism. How do we manage and govern such systems?

If entropy increases globally, it does so locally at human beings level, a phenomenon that is not necessarily irreversible. Under these conditions, what is our future? Practically speaking, how can we cope with the so-called sustainability?

This book can be used to promote an understanding among corporations, nations and individuals alike, insofar as, each of them being unique, they all can potentially unite locally in added-value collaborations of all kinds. And this is yet to happen.

I.9. A basket of relevant keywords

To provide a glimpse into the new realms presented in this book, here is a cornucopia of the terms that together will be shown to underpin the highly complex notion of sustainability.

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Figure I.5. The main fitting notions leading to the concept of sustainability are here arranged in a suite of congruous domains

1 Nonlinear dynamic systems.

PART 1

Models That Can Aspire to be Better Suited to Future Needs

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Fibonacci and nature: a global and sustainable harmony. Complex behaviors with simple structures and mechanisms. Microscopic image of a plant fractal cross-section

1

Disassembling Some Traditional Views

1.1. Time and space: past, present and future

In playing with relativity theory, we end up abandoning time as an absolute reference. Does time exist in nature? Is time necessary to describe our behavior and events? And is time a continuous variable? Coincidentally, is space limited either in a small-scale or large-scale universe?

Under these conditions, what is the impact of a time and space concept on our current operations, such as