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Developing a learning culture
Sustainable development requires businesses, organisations, groups and communities to develop a learning culture. Research occurs within this context. What do we mean by a learning culture.
Firstly, it means that you need to actively engage in a problem-solving approach to identifying and achieving your goals. This means seeing advancement as a continuous learning loop, involving gathering information, analysing it, deciding goals, deciding on policies and other actions, implementing these, monitoring the results, and then starting the process all over again. New information allows you to re-assess the appropriateness of the various policies and actions, and to make changes, leading to altered behaviour. Altering behaviour on the basis of experience is the essence of learning. The iterative, looping approach is the basis for moving forward when we can never have complete knowledge about a system as complex as a natural ecosystem, a city or neighbourhood, or a business, or just about anything that involves a group of people.
If you become committed to this learning cycle, you are adopting what has become known as a process of adaptive management. To do adaptive management well, and truly adopt a learning culture, you need to realise what it entails. Firstly it requires that you precisely define and systematically monitor the outcomes that result from your actions and policies. To be really useful, you must maintain consistent measurement and monitoring standards over long timeframes, as effects can take a long time to emerge. You may need to engage or collaborate with research organisations for really long term monitoring, as they are often more familiar with the systems and procedures that provide consistency over time. Secondly, you will need to manage your knowledge explicitly. People come and go, and without explicit record keeping and knowledge management, there can be no hope of knowledge retention, let alone the systematic knowledge advancement required for managing and improving complex systems.
You need to make changes. If you don't change anything, you can't expect to see an impact, and you can't expect to learn. This means you need to be innovative, and take to risks. And you need to be alert to the situations that allow for robust learning. This means being prepared to make significant changes, so that you can expect to measure the results, and it also means ensuring you retain a basis for comparison, to determine if your innovations were responsible for the outcomes you measured. This means you need to become something of an experimenter, and a researcher. You also need to accept the probability of failure of some innovations, as acknowledged and well understood failures provide clear opportunities for learning. And you need to approach every intervention, every policy change, and every action, as an opportunity to learn. This is the essence of a learning culture. Collaborative learning
Management of complex systems proceeds by collaborative learning, involving all stakeholders. This can be viewed as happening at two levels - at the level of the particular ecosystem that is the focus of the stakeholders, and at a more general level involving people with similar problems and issues. Increasingly this general level is global, and research is conducted as part of a global enquiry. Creative Decisions sees development of KiwiGrow™ proceeding as a process of global enquiry, centred on an open-source knowledge library.
 Because NZ2100 is a universal framework for management and sustainable development, Creative Decisions advocates establishing KiwiGrow™ working groups to steer research and development in agreed contexts. So, for the public sector, we need a global collaborative network of working groups focusing variously on, for example, wetland ecosystems in temperate regions, tropical lowland forest ecosystems, inner city urban regeneration areas, suburban residential areas in temperate regions, urban transportation systems, urban wastewater systems, urban forest ecosystems, urban light industrial areas, and so on. For the private sector, we can imagine KiwiGrow™ working groups for the construction sector, the retail sector, the manufacturing sector, primary sector industries, the restaurant sector, and the tourism sector, and so on. We need an agreed typology of "ecosystems" of all kinds so people working on particular systems can find and contribute to the working group that most closely addresses their concerns. Of course, professional groups already exist for many of these areas, providing a natural "home base" for KiwiGrow™ R&D.
It is important to realise how crucial this international collaboration is to NZ2100 becoming a practical tool for sustainable development. Ultimately, sustainable development comes down to managing large areas such as large catchments (or watersheds), cities, rural areas, and so on. Each of these areas is a mosaic of ecosystems that are potentially managed for sustainable development according to KiwiGrow™. Managing these large areas sustainably using KiwiGrow™ is simply not possible without both the detailed understanding of how to manage these component ecosystems sustainably, and the existence of on-the-ground KiwiGrow™ improvement processes with which to interact and collaborate.
 All major cities, for example, share broadly the same set of ecosystem types, and, if progress is to be made on the kinds of timeframes that we have to achieve sustainable development - that is, within the next 30-50 years - we have no choice but to engage in international collaboration. And such collaboration needs to be based on a shared vision, and a shared model of sustainable development. This is provided by the universal KiwiGrow™ model for sustainable development.
Much international "collaboration" in sustainable development is probably more aptly termed "cooperation". The difference is that collaborative efforts, and collaborative learning, are centred on a specific common purpose or goal. Creative Decisions believes that building the real systems and processes required to implement KiwiGrow™ globally provides a very concrete and powerful motivating force, and common ground, that can underpin effective collaboration that can make achieving sustainable development in the required 30-50 year timeframe a reality. Without such a focus and framework, we run the risk of drifting to various forms of catastrophe as cultures, peoples, and natural ecosystems lapse into instability, conflict, disparity and degradation. |
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