When companies redesign their products, they often do it for two reasons: either the product can be improved (easier to use, cheaper to produce, better aesthetics, safer, more efficient, more sustainable etc), or because they feel like consumers are bored with the same look and just simply want a newer shinier option. Either way, the company redesigns it frequently so that they keep up with consumer expectations.
When companies or organizations engage in updating their strategic plan, they do it to make sure they are keeping pace with evolving demands, and to explore how they might expand revenue, hire new talent, and/or meet new regulatory requirements.
However, when we deal with either national priorities or global actions, we rarely act from a place of strategic vision. We do have national frameworks to guide us (e.g. a constitution), and we have a sense of global challenges we have to face (e.g. climate change), but we don’t really put any of that into a strategic portfolio that would help us be focused on priorities and desired outcomes in a desired timeframe.
The Paris Agreement came sort of close to a strategic approach, but even this is only one part of a larger global environmental and socioeconomic suite of challenges.
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are perhaps the closest we have to global strategic plan, but although there are 17 goals and dozens and dozens of proposed targets and indicators, there aren’t many tangible ‘programs of activity’ to accomplish these. In a company’s strategic plan, for example, you would generally have several goals, and then a program or a department or a person that would be responsible for accomplishing that part of the plan, with milestones and a budget, and so on.
It seems to me, we could organize our global situation a bit differently, and more similar to the way we might include strategic processes for an organization. Or at least, it would be an interesting experiment. For example, what if we considered how to meet the sustainable development goals (across all the economic, health, climate, biodiversity etc themes) by considering what strategic redesigns were needed in just four (big) areas:
Things we use or produce (e.g. buildings, cars, food, energy)
Ways of doing things (e.g. learning, working, eating, purchasing, governing)
Equal opportunities (e.g. creating pathways for new voices to lead, innovate, or participate)
Attitudes (e.g. engendering more civic participation and support for ‘common good’)
And imagine if we had teams of people - representatives from different countries - whose responsibility it was to oversee the redesign and meet specific goals. It would be empowering I think, and possibly more effective. At the moment it seems as though the goals are set by committees from ‘on high’ and then countries adopt these broad goals (but without country-specific targets), and then the main UN task is to monitor some indicators of change.
I’d like to see a more active and explicitly strategic approach. For example, what could these kind of teams do if they were able to look at strategically redesigning buildings (say) not just to reduce energy use, or to be more resilient (as in the Paris Agreement), but also to promote health and wellbeing and to support civic engagement and community health, and reduce crime. Many cities have that sort of approach, but globally, we not doing a good job at providing the overarching support for solving multiple challenges and innovating for better.
We seem too timid somehow. It seems as though no-one wants to take on the leadership and accountability to commit and measure and redesign our world for a new century and an improved life. So what if we experimented with just one global team in one of these areas and just got to see what would happen? What would we lose?
Often, a company doesn’t do well when it lacks a clear strategy, and clear targets, and clear responsibility for meeting them.
How can we do better from a planetary perspective?
P.S. Happy Solstice and longest-day-of-the-year for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere!