I.1. Where have we got by now?

Let us observe the environment around us for a moment. What do we observe?

For one, the current state of affairs in the world is not uniform: complexity arises from every corner and irresistibly requires from us a change in our way of thinking. The fact that everything is said to be “complex” relegates “non-complex” things into the realms of oblivion and they seem to no longer exist or are incredibly weak.

Thus, we acknowledge that the factors at hand that spell irrevocable change are hard to reach, or difficult to measure, and their understanding inherently resists an analytical approach. As a result, we tend to feel caught in a sort of nest that captures our past habits, yet at our own risk.

At the same time, new concepts and opportunities visibly emerge that signify new possibilities for those who would deliberately act upon new paradigms. Unsought complexity levels result as a consequence of evolution, and also possibly by chance as permanent mutations play their spontaneous role. And both evolution and chance are factors of diversity.

The emergence of new concepts is of great importance for our own living, our society and its environment. Everything evolves toward more complexity and new functionalities are offered to living systems through three main ways:

1. By changing scale on a material plane: our society investigated the microscale over the last century and by now reached the nanoscale, which signifies offering new possibilities. The same phenomenon happened in the software development process, whose concepts always evolved and gave way to new applications, for instance due to reconfigurable and fault-tolerant pieces of code in a more global application.
2. By developing pluridisciplinary approaches and by transposing the discoveries made in biology, physics and genetics toward other activity sectors. In this way, innovative solution fields were opened.
3. By introducing new problem solving and design ways. For instance, within Nature, optimization is obtained through continuous back-and-forth trials, global convergence based on local equilibriums, and harmony between interactions, within complex and evolving networks.

Our issue is putting these new paradigms into use and co-evolving with them. This is the main subject of this book.

I.2. What evolution forward?

Society is changing, certainly due to technological evolution. In this respect, we can confidently assume that the following evolution will happen over time and soon (Figure I.1).

This diagram starts with on-premise equipment and plots the evolution toward a “Mind-to-Mind” environment (which it expresses by the term “NoMatter-to-NoMatter”). Hence, the questions: are the interconnected levels leading to a unified model? What is the level of complexity gained at each new level of the evolution? And what is the impact on sustainability?

We are still learning how to look at this 21st Century with more appropriate models. The US National Science Foundation attempts at developing funding mechanisms which are common in nature and aim to improve our way of thinking and acting, with an orientation toward sustainability. It defines its key transformative research concept as follows:

“Transformative research involves ideas, discoveries, or tools that radically change our understanding of an important existing scientific or engineering concept or educational practice or leads to the creation of a new paradigm or field of science, engineering, or education. Such research challenges current understanding or provides pathways to new frontiers.”

I.3. Tackling transformation is the job

We never found the right time and enough time, when seeking a balance to the world: this has never be placed above the priorities and general interest of human beings. Balance that places humanity in harmony with its full environment obviously involves nature, as well as economic, competitive, societal and personal realms. Without necessarily granting anything for free, it is possible to make true gifts to each other. That is awakening now on a global dimension. It renders man complete. This therefore raises some questions:

• – Why have we not collectively been able to redress our economic and financial systems to the point of certain sustainability yet?
• – Why are many disruptions still lurking behind our back, ready to stifle our policy efforts?
• – How long more are we going to repeat the past? The past has become a narrow game; it restricts and individualizes all (e.g. earnings).
• – The human journey needs searching for a new vision, a new goal, a new thinking, a new attitude and a new culture. So, how do we do all that?

To answer such questions, we have to rethink our vision of the world: the world is becoming ever more interconnected and unpredictable. Its correlated constraints are complexity and uncertainty. These create global economic, technological, political and environmental turbulences and crises. Within this context, decision-makers and managers are first hindered in their efforts to exit any crisis, then, develop, operate and control innovative business models, future organizations and production systems, new ways of living, working, and … new societies.

On the contrary, collective actions, social networks, emergence and self-organizations are quite common within nature around us; yet, they are not fully embedded into our brain or our human generative mechanisms.

This book is intended to prepare minds with a new mode of thinking toward a new conceptuality. It brings about a new way to position organizations and to relate them with each other. In order to achieve this goal, we can refer to basic mechanisms as used in nature and to main principles such as Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.

For the above reason, we have introduced new paradigms, such as “φ-design” and “G-organizations”. The term “φ-design” comes from the ancient Greek culture: “φύση = Physi”, meaning “Nature”. In the same way, “G-organization” is inspired by “Gaïa = Gé”, which relates to how everything is created, structured, organized and living on the Earth. Both approaches are complementary since they enable us to better understand and exploit the underlying principles managing the abilities of an interconnected individual, from the infinitely small up to the infinitely large scale.

With regard to the above statement, when a person speaks about “bio-inspired design”, we can easily conclude that, compared with what we are commonly doing, it is an improvement. Yet, that is a too restrictive term, as it is not related to a global system enhancement or a global optimized process. Introducing such paradigms is akin to implementing transformative research, development and engineering. It is a multidisciplinary approach since the main advances are always resulting from borderline, often straddling two scientific, social or economic disciplines.

As a consequence, this book presents business, social, economic and political concepts/arguments, models and approaches that are believed to rebuild and enable a sustainable, equitable, social and economic setting. They are novel, free from past schemes and compelling enough to set our agendas with courage, poise and deliberate acumen toward improving the human condition on a sustainable planet – the Earth.

I.4. A summary of the book

In this book, dedicated to sustainability science, we propose an integrated view of current frontiers that may be faced by any organization – be it an enterprise, an administration or any human collective construction – that operates in a given environment, with a specific goal, mission or objective. What is striking is the magnitude and the speed at which the changes, of all types, have recently appeared. Frontiers are no longer gaps but walls.

A unified approach does not seem achievable yet: relevant modeling methodologies have to be either completed or reviewed; this would probably be a tantalizing undertaking by now. The authors have nevertheless tackled the amalgamation – and, to a partial extent, the merging – of the underpinning elements (theories, domains of expertise and of practice) and propose a resulting model for assimilating the new concepts with a global view to design the sustainable organizations of the future.

An originality of the book is that the authors consider constructive links between diverse theories and practices. Even if some are not mature yet, the readers already can extract some properties and characteristics and apply them in the real world: they show their relatedness and evidence a global coherency. The book paves the way toward a general convergence theory, which will manifest, as a by-product, genuine sustainability. The way sustainability is grasped in society and economy today is only partial and quite unsatisfactory, as well as it is neither coherent nor consistent in the sense of information theory.

Furthermore, and due to the fact that same main principles apply, the book redesigns the notion of “competitiveness”. Traditional facets of competitiveness are quality, cost reduction and flexibilities (in volumes and in product specifications). Today, confusion sometimes pops up, competitiveness being often reduced to profitability.

As an example, some people say that only a swarming enterprise can intrinsically generate competitiveness, and that is from the inside. Indeed, this requires the blending of multidomains such as information theory, bio-inspired approaches, complexity sciences, networks theory and related social dynamics, scaling up and down from over macro designs down to under micro levels, etc.

As a result, we will be able to propose more efficient and effective solutions. We can also say that bio-inspired systems, or even bio-mimicry, are an enhancement in the design and development of sustainable systems. However, they already have their own limits and cannot once again bring a full and pertinent solution to our issues. We are living in an imperfect world and we have to proceed further in understanding the evolution in Nature, the oldest and most global existing system ever. This explains why it has become a necessity to get ahead in our inquisitive and prospective search and introduce the basic concepts owned by physical and other sciences.

The above considerations provide the rationale for this book.

I.5. What the present situation tells and the issues encountered

I.6. A main concept: toward new ways of thinking

All these paradoxes show that we should draw our inspiration from another world. Our initial thinking focuses on the approaches developed by the ancient Greeks: due to our rationality, we keep looking for items, facts and causes which govern the design of a new world, the speed with which the system develops, the emergence of new concepts, etc.

For example, with regard to the environment, the Greeks considered that the original and mother elements in nature were water, air, earth, fire and aether. The aether, as in our current physical theories, allowed us to explain what remained unknown; it can be considered as rarefied, intangible and transparent substance which permeates any space, even between the particles of matter, and we need to describe its properties. It is able to bring out an emerging “field”, such as an electromagnetic or gravitational field.

Today, the problem remains the same. As we will see in the following chapters, to better understand and explain the sustainability of a system, we need to introduce some ontologies, codes, undefined matters or energy, and underlying mechanisms that are able to reinforce the meanings and the foundations existing behind the term sustainability.

For instance, right now “sustainability” is a very often used word; however, we do not know how to measure such sustainability. We advocate that one way to learn about measuring the sustainability of our systems under development is to resort to the so-called “entropy generation”; the objective is to provide the society with “reduced entropy generation systems”.

That amounts to no fashionable trend or business opportunity whatsoever, since the future of all human beings is involved. It is a paradigm change, an ethics and awareness issue, and presupposes a set of drastic changes from standards, policies and practices in our own values, consciousness and way of life.

Similarly to what the ancient Greeks were thinking, we can state, with regard to our experience, that sustainability is driven by some specific codes. To drive and manage a system created and developed by human, we have identified the following codes, analogous to the five former elements that are able to unify the construction of the world (Figure I.2).

In this book, we will review these codes. We will study some of the underpinning aspects, mainly as related to the sustainability of information, information systems and decision-making in industrial systems. The study will be performed by linking these codes to, for example, the notions of time, quantum fluctuations and entropy. This is especially important considering that humanity grows its involvement in worldwide collaboration and while everything is interdependent and involves each of us too. This is of great importance to better define the concepts, methodologies and practices around sustainability by basing them on the development of more theoretical characteristics, even if we do not fully control or assimilate their impact on the real world yet. The information provided in this book is made accessible to anyone not familiar with physics through illustrative examples. This will surely avoid any theoretical and non-digestible demonstration.

I.7. Integrating the above theories into their context

The system sustainability concept is often linked to system complexity. In our mundane context, “sustainability” expresses the fact that responsible people are afraid of losing control of a “complex” phenomenon. This fact is also associated with the need to preserve a situation in the face of apparently irreversible change. Under these conditions, is sustainability a marketing trap? Or rather a real main concern? Considering what is happening in our world, we cannot tell yet, given that complexity is the normal evolution of nature.

What we do know, however, is that all the systems around us are now integrating some of these concepts into their design, engineering and development. Hereunder, we are only interested by the evolution of technologies implied in the decision and control of our industrial and economic systems. This is progressively done following the three steps below.

Step 1: extending the concepts presently used in information systems

Complexity is an invasive and not yet integrated concept, which requires a permanent adaptation of the DSS. Also, while social networks are developing, novel business analytics tools requiring the so-called NoSQL approaches remain unknown by 40% of firms. Presently, numerous research and development (R&D) organizations are trying to include complexity and networking sciences in their operations.

Such an integration is not often done satisfactorily since ambivalence is always required when managing systems. The latter statement involves the transdisciplinary skills attached to complexity theory (as studied in research laboratories) or operated in organization engineering (for enabling the transfer and application of theories to the real world), which leads us to elaborating strategies able to merge the different scientific and social advances originating from each theory and practice.

In Figure I.3, we define a global and advanced vision for gathering and linking together the different theories and technologies for solving production or sustainability problems. The resulting integration merges two different ways of thinking and highlights the progressive development observed in many associated sciences and technologies:

• – In the first stage, two independent groups of disciplines were established and used independently: the scientific and the psycho-socio group. That was less than a century ago.
• – In the second stage, the decision, control and management technologies evolved. In many technical systems, some new sciences and technologies that were created or developed independently of each other (such as cybernetics, systems theory and NLDS) were progressively applied. This happened during the past 50 years.
• – Presently, a few closer relationships are being grown between different domains. Yet, our way of thinking has not changed. For instance, many decision-makers have not yet integrated the transition from on-premise to pure cloud, that is to say, from complexity to networking.

To better appraise and operate the complexity and sustainability of our systems, a full convergence of all disciplines involved will be required in the future. This last part of the graph can be dubbed “convergence theory” as it implies the working in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways with a view to integrate and assimilate the above-defined complementary sciences.

This was the very aim of the Advanced Technology Group (ATG) within IBM, which was devoted to the competitiveness of its European development and manufacturing centers during the 1990s. This is the only way to understand global challenges, prepare for paradigm changes and develop innovative and best-suited technologies. Today’s business intelligence technologies cover the matter in part, but through a too conventional approach based on quantitative and qualitative databases methods.

We should note that such a graph is an updated view of what we could consider as an integrative model of innovative theories and/or sciences. The reason is that it shows how the different theories have been progressively introduced and exercised in decision management and operational research. It is a general graph that can be used in any field as it becomes evermore difficult to elaborate a solution in an ever more complex environment. When problem solving leads to a dead end, we have to go and look elsewhere for solutions to the problem. Pluridisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are thus necessary for a more sustainable problem solving.

Unfortunately, based on our experience gained at IBM during the last three decades and the difficulties in sometimes getting consistent solutions, we had to extend our vision and develop the transposition and the development of concepts already well known in physics. We did so through European-funded projects, which required additional work for integrating them within “production systems” sciences. We have obtained a global framework, enabling us to process and challenge the sustainability issues of any system in a better way.

As said above, and keeping the graph in mind, we can develop some aspects and theories related to the sustainability, complexity and entropy concepts of any complex system. Sustainability is merely an emerging property resulting from the application of the above codes and theories, which already prevail in nature. This suggests new questions such as:

• – In complex systems, are revolutionary properties emerging? If yes, how do we tune the concept of sustainable systems?
• – In the monitoring and control field, are actual engineering technologies suitable for the design and development of sustainable systems?

Actually, too many questions remain to be answered in terms of consistency or matching sustainability requirements. What is used in nature could be different from what is expected or desired by policy makers, politicians or ideologists. This requires reconsidering the potentialities of this graph in more depth. What we can say is that any concept and approach has to be considered through the different codes as mentioned before. For instance, when a decision has to be taken, we cannot ignore that it is depending on physical conditions (i.e. code of matter), biological considerations (i.e. code of life), emotional and psychic concerns (i.e. code of thought), and social and intercations (i.e. code of complexity).

Step 2: a new and sustainability-oriented paradigm of theories and sciences

In the above step, we have seen the reasons why we need to go further and implement some missing components of the puzzle : they mainly consist of basic physics principles that are part of, for example, the so-called “quantum physics”, or “entropy theory”.

Such an evolution of the theory of organizations seems evident: by their outgrowth, all systems created in nature are based on similar basic principles. There would be little reason to stay away from new technology and science inputs, just because it remains difficult to understand and control them or because we only partially know them. Moreover, we are facing a cultural issue that hampers their implementation, as we tend to think in terms of a “technology development” paradigm. For us, deepening a science we are already skilled at is far easier (and a lot more comfortable) than looking for instabilities and permanently reconsidering our intellectual assets through transdisciplinary knowledge and know-how.

Step 3 : A new paradigm leading to the ‘whole sustainability’

Figure I.4 elaborates a new global representation of the concepts introduced in this book. In the five boxes located in lower part, and left side, of the graph, the domains marked in yellow (or the darker gray) generally cover what is commonly used to investigate a problem and find a solution (e.g. an algorithmic solution). In the blue domains, paradigmatic changes are already found, and some issues and topics are starting to be used in products and services. They emerge from concepts such as evolution and emergence theories, as encountered in bio-inspired approaches (form and pattern generation, adaptation mechanisms, etc.). The domains represented in white are known; yet they are not commonly taken into consideration in global and integrated design and sustainable approaches.

I.8. Application on an example relevant to entropy and network theory

Humanity succeeded in understanding how an ecosystem works, and in collecting the new expectations of a society. But is this not yesterday’s approach? The fact is that we are living within and through networks (telecommunications, social, etc.) in a global community which is rapidly changing and where everything is connected to a single biosphere, based on complementary modes of functioning. Modes and codes influence and alter our relationships to just anything: our ways of thinking and designing things or making smart systems. And that happens within all organizations and organisms, including industry. Moreover, Western countries have shifted from a “duty” society to more individualism, and now are moving to a new hedonism and eudemonism. How do we manage and govern such systems?

If entropy increases globally, it does so locally at human beings level, a phenomenon that is not necessarily irreversible. Under these conditions, what is our future? Practically speaking, how can we cope with the so-called sustainability?

This book can be used to promote an understanding among corporations, nations and individuals alike, insofar as, each of them being unique, they all can potentially unite locally in added-value collaborations of all kinds. And this is yet to happen.

I.9. A basket of relevant keywords

To provide a glimpse into the new realms presented in this book, here is a cornucopia of the terms that together will be shown to underpin the highly complex notion of sustainability.