Assessment and situation analysis

Once you have defined the boundaries of your problem area, your first step in management is assessment and situation analysis. From the start, you will have some principal participants, who have identified some high level issues that need to be addressed, for example improving the water quality of a lake. You will need to clarify these issues, and the agendas of these principal participants, at the outset, to ensure the process does not, in the desire to be holistic, lose its focus. Having said that, the main problem may be redefined a number of times, as you prioritise your engagement.

Where you have agreement that that the problem to be addressed is systemic in nature, and sustainable solutions will involve changing community behaviour, you will likely benefit from a broad sustainability assessment - on the premise that the system is evidently "unhealthy" and there is a need to establish the extent and nature of unhealthy behaviour, and interactions that lead to the main issues of concern.

This defines the initial motivation for a NZ2100 sustainability assessment covering social, economic, environmental and cultural dimensions. You will need to establish a set of preliminary definitions for each of the 28 performance areas, reflecting your collective ideas about how a healthy ecosystem should behave or function. This process will then help you to identify a set of stakeholders, who can work with you to refine or extend the definitions for the 28 performance areas, and identify measures for data collection, with the resources available. Where you have limited resources, assessment and situation analysis may be largely qualitative, and based primarily on information that is readily available. You will need to choose a time period over which past and present behaviour is to be assessed, based on how far you believe you need to go back to establish root causes of problems, or to obtain some idea of the earlier, more healthy system that you may want to recreate, or at least recover aspects of. For systems that are likely to involve ecological rehabilitation, the nature of pre-existing ecosystems will provide much of the motivation for efforts to improve system health.

Viewing your system alternately as a social system, an economic system, an environmental system, and a cultural system, will help you to identify system components that will provide structure for your assessment. For example, an organisation may have sites, business units, groups, or teams. An urban water catchment may have neighbourhoods, subcatchments, business areas, stream riparian margins, streams, forested areas, and so on. Some of these components may overlap spatially, and there will be no unique way of identifying the system components. The set of components you work with will be determined by the level of detail you have resources to engage in, and your ability to delegate power and responsibility to KiwiGrow™ processes addressing health of component systems.

How you proceed from here also depends on the resources available. At one extreme, you can ask the 28 NZ2100 performance questions, of each of the components you have identified. Alternatively you may retain the broad view, and ask the following questions: where (i.e. in which components) is the system's ability to be socially nurturing degraded or threatened; where is capacity to be socially supportive degraded or threatened; where is there evidence of social instability; where is there evidence of impaired or threatened ability to be contribute socially; where is there evidence of impaired social responsiveness to change; where are the areas that show evidence of impaired or threatened ability to be socially adaptive; and where are the areas that appear to have reduced social directedness. Similar questions are asked to characterise economic, environmental, and cultural performance. Obtaining answers to these questions needs to maximise involvement of people who live or work within the system, or who are other stakeholders, as they need to have faith in the integrity of the enquiry process and the data that is collected.

From this sustainability assessment will emerge a whole collection of stories and issues, that describe the current health of the system and how it came to be that way, over the chosen time frame. These stories must be shared with the community of the catchment, city, or neighbourhood, or the people who work within the organisation, and so on. This will involve physically meeting and sharing the findings, as well as creative use of new information and communication technologies, including multimedia and the internet. Graphical depiction of the system, allowing people to zoom into particular components to explore the data and stories that have been collected, will assist people to explore the information and encourage the spirit of open enquiry. Where issues are locally very sensitive, involving particular individuals or locations, information will clearly need to be handled carefully, with some reliance on personal interaction.

If this sounds like a lot of work, you must remember that delegating power and responsibility to KiwiGrow™ processes focusing on particular system components provides the key to gathering meaningful information, and securing appropriate responses, at each level. While you will provide guidance with the overarching KiwiGrow™ process, including maintaining ongoing awareness of the issues that initially motivated the sustainability assessment, you will need to manage two-way communication, to enhance coordination and collaboration, and shared responsibilities.

Visioning, goal-setting, and prioritisation

While it may be tempting to set out detailed pictures or word pictures of the future state of your system, you need to remember that no-one can foretell the future, and you will need to balance statements describing outcomes with statements that describe processes. Preparing specific definition statements for each of the 28 KiwiGrow™ community and environmental health performance areas, will take you a long way towards defining your vision. You will need to agree on what it means to be socially nurturing, socially supportive, socially stable, economically nurturing, and so on. And you will need to obtain input from within your organisation, business or community, so that the statements you adopt reflect a sustainable consensus. This does not mean that the vision or goals as a whole will have been agreed - it simply means that you have agreed what it means to be healthy in each of these areas.

Next you have to gather information on how the issues might be resolved - the various potential solutions that are available, or likely to be available during the planning timeframe. Then you need to define alternative visions that show how issues are resolved in a coherent manner, from the perspective of different stakeholder groups. This process will probably involve exploring management and technical options further. It will also involve gaining clarity on the priorities of the different stakeholder groups, in terms of the tradeoffs that they consider to be acceptable. At the most basic level, stakeholder groups may differ in the priorities they attach to social, economic, environmental, or cultural dimensions of health.

Visions should ideally be communicated in different ways. They are holistic statements that need to engage with people at a holistic level. Thus, simply producing a list may not work well, and it may be necessary to consider a static graphic representation, a video, or various multimedia techniques that allow you to synthesise statements made using text, sound, images, and video or animation.

Next, these alternative visions need to be debated, and the ability of each to be adapted to accommodate principal concerns of the other stakeholder groups assessed. This can involve a range of communication mechanisms to ensure feedback is obtained from within the community or the organisation. Comment and debate can be structured using the NZ2100 matrix, so that all 28 aspects of community and environmental health are dealt with systematically. To facilitate this process, you can use decision support tools that allow individuals or groups to specify their priorities - in terms of the 28 performance areas, or in terms of a simplified set of customised criteria that reflect principal concerns - and then to discover the scenario that best serves these criteria. This may lead people to compromise on their priorities, when they find their influence on the final result. Using the record of the debate, you then need to prepare a synthesis of the alternative visions that best reflects the priorities of the community or organisation, from which you can draw up a set of goals and strategy to achieve sustainable development.

Tradeoffs

The KiwiGrow™ approach is based on a holistic view of system health. If an organisation, city, or other entity seeks to be sustainable, then none of the 28 NZ2100 performance areas should be under significant threat. Even for a business operating from premises that include just a small area of unbuilt land, it is necessary to ensure that it is not contributing negatively, for example in terms of polluted surface water, emissions to the atmosphere, and seeds of weeds - and that it maintains itself as an ecological system that makes such a contribution: it is nurturing and regenerative in terms of its capacities to emit clean air, clean water, and so on (i.e. its filters are replaced, new and improved cleaning technologies are used, and low impact soil-plant systems that treat stormwater are cared for to ensure they become well-established and fully functional); it is supportive in terms of the components responsible for these contributions - (for example, there are appropriate maintenance regimes in place, for motor vehicles, air filters and stormwater devices); it is stable, so that no components responsible for emissions of clean air or water are liable to break down to the extent that unacceptably large emissions result (for example, on-site constructed slopes are designed to ensure that they do not fail and release large quantities of sediment into an adjoining streams), it is responsive to pressures (for example, filters function effectively within the high end range of factory output, or stormwater devices accommodate infrequent larger events, and recover from any damage that results during these events); and similarly for the requirements to be environmentally adaptive and directed.

Therefore, sustainable development truly requires that performance does not lag in any of the 28 areas. In reality, the ability of a system to change to address issues relating to each of the 28 areas will be constrained, and priorities must be established and tradeoffs made. Similarly, when a major development is proposed, it should ideally improve or not threaten performance in any of the 28 areas if it is to be truly sustainable. However, even with the best option available, there may be performance areas that are negatively affected. This requires a judgement as to whether the tradeoff to be made is acceptable. The NZ2100 framework provides a way of clearly presenting, at a high level, the tradeoffs that are made. The matrix can be coloured or shaded to indicate areas of improved or decreased performance so these can be recognised and debated, and decision support systems of various kinds can be used to help with the final decision between the various options that are available.

There may also be a requirement to make spatial tradeoffs - for example favouring ecological rehabilitation of one area of bush as opposed to another. You will need to assess the sustainability of these tradeoffs using the KiwiGrow™ performance matrix for the wider landscape, or the city, or region - that is, in terms of systems that assure the community and environmental health of these larger areas, and the particular way that health has been defined.

Strategic and tactical planning, and choosing methods

With clear goals in place, you can prepare a strategy to achieve the goals. You may have defined goals for all or just some of the NZ2100 performance areas, depending on where the issues lie. To develop strategy, you will need to "stand in the future" and decide what you did, and when, to achieve the goals, which should have a clear timeframe. You may be unclear about methods to achieve these various milestones or objectives, but should at least be convinced of their achievability, perhaps on the basis of experience elsewhere. You will find that various methods will impact on achievement of multiple goals, so it is important to keep track of these interactions, using a graphical diagram or database.

In situations where you have a plan, and a set of objectives, but lack of clarify on methods, you may be open to project proposals to achieve the objectives and milestones. You will then need to evaluate these proposals according to a systematic framework. The NZ2100 matrix provides a quadruple bottom line framework to use to assess each proposal, which can be scored for its contribution to goals and objectives in each of the 28 performance areas, as well as to the primary objective under which it was proposed.

Tactical planning is short term planning, or "implementation". You will need to ask yourself what you can do now, or this year, to achieve your objectives.

Monitoring, Experimentation, and Collaborative Learning

The ecosystem approach, including its implementation in KiwiGrow™ , places great emphasis on monitoring, adaptive management, and collaborative learning. All of these depend on observations and measurement. The types of observations you will want to make will include -

• Monitoring of system health using indicators chosen to measure performance for each of the 28 KiwiGrow™ performance areas. Some of these will be "key" performance indicators.
• Monitoring achievement of specific goals, objectives and milestones within your strategy
• Monitoring implementation of methods to achieve objectives
• Monitoring as part of specific research projects
• Monitoring for large scale management experiments.

While all these forms of monitoring and measurement support an adaptive, learning approach to management, the latter monitoring provides the most effective means for determining the effectiveness of methods and policies, as you will have built in the necessary scientifically-based requirements to provide statistically significant results, and will also have experiments conducted at a scale large enough to reduce the significance of much of the variability associated with complex systems. For long term ecological monitoring, you will need to consider how you can assure consistent monitoring over long periods. For true adaptive management, you need to build a culture of learning, where every intervention is approached from the perspective of what can be learned from it. In particular, all monitoring has to be designed with reporting, review, and adaptive decision-making in mind.

In collaborative learning, you are working with others to build understanding of the system, and to learn how best to achieve an objective. You will be sharing knowledge at every step of the process, maximising use of the internet and multimedia, especially where the public is involved.

You need to understand what can be measured by whom over what time frame. Ideally, representatives of the groups whose behaviour may need to change as a result of the monitoring should be involved in the design of the monitoring process, as well as the evaluation of the results. Large organisations have limited ability to conduct detailed, fine-grained monitoring, even though this ability is improving through automated instrumentation and high resolution satellite imagery, for ecological problems. You need to consider where it is better to delegate responsibility for management to a KiwiGrow™ process devoted to a particular component of your system, whether it is a particular group business unit in your organisation, or a stream within a catchment.

The NZ2100 model is a new management framework, and many of the performance areas have not been the direct focus of much monitoring. You will find you are frequently at the leading edge, making use of experience with use of particular indicators, but also grappling with the uniqueness of your own system. Creative Decisions is a first port of call when you are faced with these problems, and the KiwiGrow™ network is intended to grow to support development of an open-source library of resources that you can draw on and either use directly or adapt for your own situation.

Understanding interactions

Complex systems such as organisations and ecosystems are held together through a network of interactions linking their components. In the context of ecosystems we talk about their function or role within the hierarchical fabric of ecosystems of which they are a part. A soil ecosystem provides the functions of nutrient cycling, providing nutrients and water for plant growth, and so on. A forest ecosystem performs a range of functions including consumption of atmospheric carbon dioxide and production of oxygen, and providing food and habitat for wildlife. In NZ2100, these interactions are represented using the "contributing" system quality, and when designing systems to measure system health, it is first necessary to conceptualise the range of these roles and functions. Measuring these functions provides the first step toward understanding interactions.

The second step towards understanding interactions is understanding the processes that are responsible for maintaining these functions and roles. So, you need to think, when considering how to measure the other six qualities, in any of the four dimensions, how these qualities affect ecosystem function, role, or ability to "contribute". For example, you will need to think about how the state of regeneration ("nurturing") within the system determines long term ability to contribute. Similarly, how is the system response to pressures and opportunities affecting its contribution.

The third step in understanding interactions is to analyse data you gather to statistically relate different performance measures. This will provide clues to what is going on, that may need to be followed up with specific investigations.

The final step in understanding interactions is process-based research to test hypotheses that may arise from more general monitoring, or from reflection on the structure of your system, and general evidence as to how it works.

When considering internal interactions that affect the ability to be contributing, you need to think, for example, of how each of the seven system qualities for describing your system as a social system, might affect any of the other 21 system qualities. If you have a large organisation, how does the need to be socially nurturing (e.g. new staff, young trainees) influence your ability to be economically nurturing (new business ventures, new markets, etc), or environmentally supportive (perhaps young new staff are more environmentally aware), or culturally adaptive (perhaps they are bringing new knowledge that you need to sustain your development). Considering these potential interactions, NZ2100 gives you a large number of creative ideas or hypotheses to explore, if you want to improve performance in any one of the 28 performance areas.

Communication and securing involvement

When dealing with complex systems, a fundamental issue is obtaining agreement on the nature of the problem. Typically, different groups of people will have different perspectives, whether they are from different teams or sites in a large organisation, or different neighbourhoods in a city, or from different professional backgrounds or cultures. A common problem in securing participation is the belief among some quarters that the problem, and possibly even the solution, has already been defined. What motivation can there be to contribute to the process. Secondly, even if we get everyone together, we have the problem of managing complex dialogues.

KiwiGrow™ helps with both of these problems. Firstly, the problem-space is defined from the start, in terms of the ecosystem whose health and sustainability is in question. This may be an organisation, a city, or a natural but polluted ecosystem and the adjoining farms and urban areas that interact with it. Making this decision is not without difficulty, as people may be inclined to expand the ecosystem and the scope of the debate further and further. However, the rule ought to be, start from the smallest unit first, and expand the process only if credible strategies and plans for action fail to emerge. This will always be a risk in problems that involve national or international policies. Here, it is helpful to differentiate between internal and external stakeholders. An internal stakeholder resides or works within the ecosystem as it has been physically defined, whereas an external stakeholder is affected by, or may influence, the health of the ecosystem, but lives and works outside it. Recognition that external stakeholders exist and need to be involved in the debate provides a means of ensuring the ecosystem is kept manageable. If the ecosystem is unavoidably large, then consideration needs to be given to starting the process through a number of separate KiwiGrow™ processes for each of the major component ecosystems.

With the ecosystem defined, the KiwiGrow™ matrix immediately provides a framework and Common Language for community and stakeholder input, investigation, and assessment, as well as synthesising and presenting results. The framework may be used to bring together contributions from different groups at a large gathering, or from individuals or groups communicating over the internet. At the outset, everyone knows the scope of the "problem", which may be assisted by some preliminary expansion of the definitions for each of the 28 KiwiGrow™ performance areas. See: Understanding NZ2100. They will also be guided by, but not restricted by, some general statements of the issues that brought them all together in the first place.

Because it provides such a convenient way to structure dialogue and other forms of communication, NZ2100 lends itself to multimedia and conventional text-and-image communication over the internet. The greater ecosystem can be depicted graphically, as can components ecosystems with their own KiwiGrow™ processes. Each ecosystem can then be linked to its own NZ2100 matrix and associated interface to the transcript or summary of the dialogue.

Rewarding sustainable behaviour

Rewards for sustainable behaviour will always be a combination of the tangible, such as increased prices for goods sold from a business operating by sustainability principles, and the intangible, such as social and environmental rewards. As sustainable development becomes more prevalent, it will be increasingly more common for all of these rewards to be more significant. If this is to be the case, however, people need to know how to differentiate the sustainable from the unsustainable, or the more sustainable from the less sustainable. Organisations, businesses, or cities, for example, that are managed to maximise sustainability performance according to the KiwiGrow™ , have numerous avenues open to them to advertise their greater sustainability. One of these avenues can be through formal certification programmes tied to sustainability reporting using the NZ2100 framework. One of the problems consumers have with certification programmes is appreciating what they mean. There can also be a lot of "gloss" associated with a certification programme that addresses a fraction of the issues that would be identified in a KiwiGrow™ sustainability assessment. There can also be too many of these certification programmes, which invariably emerge from industries with particular needs in terms of market access and the desire to be seen to be addressing particular concerns. All this can be confusing for consumers, but can be ameliorated by moving towards a common sustainability and certification framework, such as can potentially be provided through KiwiGrow™. We are talking quite "imaginatively" here, but general adoption of KiwiGrow™ could see you choosing your holiday destination operated by KiwiGrow™ -certified operators, buying your food from supermarkets with KiwiGrow™ - certified supply chains, buying your shoes from stores selling shoes from KiwiGrow™ - certified shoe manufacturers, and so on. In this way, purchasing decisions can help to entrench a general set of values that guide production as well as consumption. Sustainability reporting using NZ2100 can also help guide local and especially international investment, where a single sustainability assessment framework is required to inform global investment decisions. For more on this topic, see Ethical Investment.

The KiwiGrow™ open-source approach to knowledge sharing (see Using Web 2.0), with information on assessment procedures and tools available readily accessible over the internet, contributes to minimising barriers faced by businesses in understanding and conforming to KiwiGrow™ standards. Businesses can also contribute to the open source effort themselves, and become experts in their own industry, and gain competitive advantage, either from greater income from selling their products, or through the additional revenue from promoting innovative management procedures.

Risks and decisions under uncertainty: risk portfolios

We often act when we perceive there is a risk involved in not acting. Risk, or the possibility of loss, provides a powerful motivator. In KiwiGrow™ , environmental and community health is captured in a matrix of 28 performance areas. Unacceptable performance in any of these areas has an associated implicit risk: we know that there are likely to be negative consequences of failing to be socially nurturing, or failing to contribute economically, or failing to adapt culturally by taking on board new technologies, and so on.

Systems risk analysts talk of "modes" of systems failure. Each of the 28 KiwiGrow™ performance areas is a potential failure mode, whereby the system as a whole is brought to state of failure, or at least some unacceptable state of degradation or lack of health. In turn, each of these 28 performance areas has associated with it a number of failure modes, each with their own sets of failure conditions. Consequently, managing the health of the ecosystem can be viewed as juggling a portfolio of risks. All things being equal, the ecosystem will be more robust, and less likely to fail (i.e. have unacceptable health) if each failure mode has many, relatively independent conditions for failure.

Establishing performance measures, or indicators, using KiwiGrow™ involves identifying what these individual failure modes are. It could be that you will identify just one critical failure mode for one of the KiwiGrow™ performance areas. For example, economic stability may be effectively determined by just one situation. More likely, there will be multiple ways that your economic system could become unstable. And each of these ways will have a number of conditions. You will need to identify these.

Note that if we approach system health this way, the focus is on unhealthy states, and limits. This presupposes that we know what the limits are, which will often not be the case. So the limits will be uncertain, and some of the risk we have to think about comes from our own lack of knowledge. A precautionary approach, which is sometimes invoked in sustainability problems, would have us acting on the basis of this total risk - i.e. true risk plus risk arising from lack of knowledge. A sensible approach to many of these situations is to gather more information, if this is possible with the resources and time available.

We can, if we wish, use the NZ2100 framework without recourse to the idea of limits and failure, utilising instead scales which indicate a range from degraded health to highly healthy. In this way we can build up an overall score for one of the 28 performance areas by some combination of the scores for the component measures.

With this "risk portfolio" approach, we can see that when resources for improvement are limited, our decision-making involves trading off one risk, or collection of risks, against another. This requires well informed debate. This debate will have a subjective and an objective component. On one hand, some risks will be more critical than others, in terms of their effect on overall system health or the likelihood of "failure" in other performance areas. And these interactions can be explored objectively. On the other hand, interactions may seem to be non-existent or sufficiently weak for us to make the trade-off decision simply as a matter of preference or values. Either way, it is important that these trade-offs are made more explicit than they usually tend to be.