Vital Perspectives for Environmental Managers
April 24, 2008 by John Morelli and AYOUB MOHAMED | Filed under: The EM as an Industrial Ecologist [1]
Tom Seager, has just provided this important, hopeful, and encouraging discussion that expands and enriches this topic. Thanks, Tom.
One of the difficulties in environmental management is that the EM is often perceived within the organization as an overhead cost to be minimized, rather than a valuable resource to be maximized. Corporate decision makers engage EM only through the prism of risk. That could be risk of jail, risk of fines, or risk of loss of brand image. So the idea of risk in some organizations is sufficiently broad for EM to have a voice, but rarely is EM part of the overall strategy of the company.
The concept of sustainability is challenging the traditional role of EM as a service unit within a typical corporation. Corporate approaches to sustainability are beginning to recognize the other side of the risk coin, which is opportunity.
Just as sustainability challenges and broadens our understanding of environment, resilience challenges and broadens our understanding of risk. Resiliency is about risks that you can not anticipate, can’t quantify and probably aren’t prepared for. A resilient organization or business model must be adaptive, flexible and responsive. It must also tolerate some redundancy, some spare capacity. Strategies for resilience can be antithetical to strategies for optimization. So, in a cost minimization mentality, resilience is typically sacrificed as a result of a narrowing of perspective. The result can be something like Polaroid, which failed to adapt to a digital marketplace despite their reputation has a high tech company. Or it could be Kodak, which developed an on-line picture sharing business model for digital photography that completely missed the idea of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which are primarily about sharing and adding content to pictures. The idea of risk in design might ask the question “what are the odds that it will break.” By contrast, the idea of resilience might ask “How will it work when it is broken?”
What is the role of the EM in business strategy, then? I argue that EM can be especially valuable to corporate strategists if EMs can move their own understanding of the organizational relationship to the environment -> sustainability transition from the perspective of a risk -> resilience transition.
So, EMs have to be among the first in their organizations to understand both sustainability and resilience and they have to invest themselves in teaching it to people within.
Mr. Morelli, I agree with you that an EM could be valuable in their organizations if they could make a change, making them understand the sustainability and resilience. The question, for me as a beginner EM, how can I make this happen in my company? especially when it is a new idea for them. I find it a big task, How to break it down?