Nourish & Thrive Conference

The conference "Nourish and Thrive" was organized on October 10, 2023 by 2030, the CEO Alliance for Sustainability, which is a collective of Belgian CEOs (and directors) launched in 2020 to discuss the pressing need for societal transformations and the necessary reinvention of companies.

First of all, the opening words of Olivier Lefebre, pointing out the trade-off between efficiency and resilience, were really laudable, and I don't think it had the effect that it should. To paraphrase him, we have spent too much time making systems optimized and efficient at the cost of resilience and redundancy. This is an important statement coming from an economist.

In fact, we have spent two centuries following the optimization and efficiency mantra to the point where everyone nowadays uses those words almost all the time as if they are the natural way of doing things. "We want to improve; we want to optimize" is becoming the narrative orthodoxy. The fact of the matter is that while optimization and efficiency (to a certain point) can produce good results for engineering problems, which is why it started during the mechanized industrial revolution, it makes systems fragile to external variations. An efficient and overoptimized system is a fragile system. A fragile system is not a resilient system.

This trade-off between efficiency and resilience, or efficiency and adaptability, stems from the level of connectivity between moving parts. A highly connected system such as the food system, as shown by Hans Bruyninckx, displays high-level efficiency. In other words, you don't have decoupled and independent components in the food system that have the property to render the whole adaptable through their own behavior. This apparent fragility is wide open since a slight food shock has the potential for a global impact. This same principle can also be applied at a lower scale, such as organizations. This explains why companies in their quest for efficiency, when they grow, put in place policies and procedures that render them rigid and unable to adapt to internal or external variations.

Having been to many conferences that discuss major issues such as climate change and subsequent strategies to deal with it, the discussion frequently leads to the trap of pointing out political decision-makers. Notwithstanding the role of the latter, this is, for us, an admission of a failure to internalize that the problem is complex. And complexity cannot be sorted out with simplicity. It's not just enacting laws that are going to make the problem disappear. It's very complex, let's simplify. We have been hearing this over and over again. Unfortunately, it does not work like this, period.

A complex problem emerges when you have various connected parts, each with its own properties and agenda. It creates a whole that is difficult to predict. A simple solution would not only not work but can lead to adverse effects. A complex problem requires, first and foremost, a complete acknowledgement of this fact. Second, it requires complex thinking, which is not as bad as it sounds. It basically implies that one should gather a diverse set of stakeholders generating diverse opinions and a solution from which to choose.

Now, to come back to the initial issue of climate change and its consequences, two options are possible: top-down and bottom-up approaches. The latter would foster diversity and innovation as a way to shift the degradation pattern. However, given the fact that we are here dealing with an existential risk and that the rate of climate change is accelerating, we don't think we have another choice. But what top-down approaches are we talking about? At the national level, EU level, or global level. The task is monumental. This may seem fatalistic, but maybe we need to wait for the next global crisis à la COVID to start acting. Some will fare well; others will adapt, and obviously, some will struggle, but life will always find a way.