by Dr. Braden Allenby, AT&T EH&S Vice President
(Reprinted with permission from the Green Business Letter)

The political state of global climate change is tumultuous and highly polarized, and lends itself to polemic, rather than dialog, on all sides. But there is one aspect of the commentary, regardless of where it comes, that is interesting for what it reveals about our lack of understanding of the systems with which we are involved. That is the assumption that the climate-change negotiations represent the major initiative by humanity to respond to global climate change issues.

This implicit assumption reflects an important truth about the way humans and their institutions – whether firms, NGOs, governments, or academia – approach all environmental perturbations: We admit to uncertainty about the natural systems involved – all while continuing to act as if the systems were simple and manageable by a centralized control mechanism like a treaty.

Moreover, for this to work, we also need to believe that we understand the impacts of such treaties – on natural systems, on economic, political, and cultural systems. Both assumptions are most likely wrong and demonstrate a profound inability to understand the way complex systems evolve.

For one thing, one would not expect any form of centralized management or control system to be effective in a truly complex system; the information content and dynamics of such systems preclude it. And when one turns from the simple system model, one finds in the case of climate change significant evolution just where one would expect to: in myriads of decentralized forms, operating at very different temporal and spatial scales, in many different ways, most of which are self-organized in unpredictable ways.

Most firms in affected sectors – finance, energy, biotechnology, agriculture, automotive, etc.- continue to research and explore alternatives. Their motives may be purely defensive, but no firm with any capability is going to be blind to where the science and the politics increasingly point. NGOs continue to coalesce around alternative strategies. Engineers are talking about adaptive technologies. Academics study global climate change from its various perspectives. Religions are thinking about how environmental perturbations such as climate change fit within their tradition. The change in the world over the past decade or so, taken as a whole, is extraordinary – and, for most people, even (especially?) those most heavily involved, almost invisible.

Technologies also evolve rapidly under such circumstances. For example, AT&T is aggressively implementing telework and virtual-office technologies. Currently, about 26% of the firm’s managers telework at least once a week, and 11% are virtual (that is, they have no assigned office space). AT&T estimates it saved some 110 million miles of driving and 5.1 million gallons of gas, avoiding the emission of almost 50,000 tons of CO2.

But the drivers that have made this technology a success are enhanced employee satisfaction, significant benefit to the firm in cost reductions and employee recruitment and retention, and substantial benefits (reduced congestion, reduced demand for new roads) to the communities where AT&T is located. Think of what could happen if such working patterns were cascaded through developed economies alone. Benefits would differ according to cultural and infrastructure conditions, but they would in most cases be worthwhile – not just to the environment, but to all involved.

It’s complicated, but that’s how evolution occurs in complex systems. In a real sense, it’s only our mental models, tied as they are to the past, that prevent us from seeing the adaptation occurring all around us. Moreover, as this example points out, the difficulty is exacerbated because, in a world that is highly complex socially, technologically, and economically, many such adaptations and technologies may well be invisible to all but those directly involved.

The point is not whether a treaty is desirable – that debate goes on. The point, rather, is that complex systems evolve in response to exogenous changes in state; that they are doing so now; and that they will continue to do so. We need to learn how to perceive such adaptation, and understand it, and encourage it – which means that we need to learn a lot more about the complexity of the world we have created, and must live in.