The Anthropocene

We had got used to being insignificant.  Copernicus showed that we were not at the centre of the universe.  Darwin found an explanation for the variety of species that did not involve them being created for our benefit.  But just as we had got used to being unimportant, it turns out that things are changing.  The Economist is amongst the latest to note the view that we are living in the Anthropocene age – a geological time in which the development of life on earth is dominated by mankind.

This change of perspective reflects our increasing recognition of the impact we have on our planet.  As individuals, our impact is normally insignificant, but as the number of our species has grown and our individual impacts have increased, these multipliers have added up to an unimaginable impact on the planet’s ecosystems.

As we wait for legislation, the markets, or scientific innovators to solve the problem for us, the costs are beginning to mount.  Insurance costs are on the rise.  Speculators, investors and consumers drive up commodity prices in ways that are proving hard to predict.  It is difficult to know what to do in the face of such uncertainty and change.  However, standing still looks like a poor strategy.  Businesses need to be flexible, to learn and to adapt continually.

The traditional approach to learning is to rely on experts.  Unfortunately, in times of rapid change, experts have only a part of the picture.  What is most needed are experimenters – people who can combine thinking about what is known with speculation, turning it into testable hypotheses.  They will then run fast, inexpensive experiments to inform business decisions.  How do you know whether these experiments lead to success or failure?  As Columbia professor Rita Gunther McGrath observes, you don’t – so you need your experimenters to be expert in learning from all outcomes – including failures.

The current crop of entrepreneurs is doing exactly this.  As sustainability author Andrew Winston has blogged for HBR, both new business leaders and venture capitalists are making bets on businesses that solve sustainability problems.  These aren’t first-time-right ventures, but resilient enterprises that have kept going until they found a solution.  For example, third place winner PK Clean has based its business on technologies that are the fallout from many inventions and innovations tested and redesigned over decades.

But how do we decide what sorts of experiment to run?  The answer comes from a good understanding of the organisation’s impacts and vulnerabilities.  Your experiments will aim to reduce these.  From this point of view, the experts are not the external change consultants, but your internal experts who know full well what your firm does to the environment (even if they don’t know how much), and who have a pretty good idea of your firm’s critical needs – those things you cannot do business without.

The key factor for success is straightforward: manage your changes as experiments, not just “pilot projects”.  In other words, the aim should be not to “prove” that they are a success, but to evaluate them critically and learn from the results.

We humans are coming to dominate our planet in a way we did not anticipate.  The coming decades will favour those firms that acknowledge this, and deal with the changing environment with ingenuity and open-mindedness.  The winners will accept that the answers may not yet be “out there” – they’ll use sound methodologies to find the answers that really work... if only until the next change.