p.3 Executive Summary... The research suggests that the cities studied constrain their ability to
ever become sustainable by setting unsustainable goals, managing for outcomes rather than system health using lagging rather
than leading indicators... Real sustainability may require a new way of thinking... approaches... include managing
for system health rather than for outcomes, setting sustainable goals that can catalyze innovation,
intentionally undertaking programs that enable people to act their way into transformed ways of thinking.
p.7 One source of confusion in the discussion about sustainability arises from the failure to distinguish
between "what" resources or valued conditions should be sustained and "how" to sustain them... sustainability is not a thing.
As Newton and Freyfogle point out, "the term (sustainability) is an adjective dressed up as a noun... sustainability
is not a freestanding goal so much as an attribute of the means used to achieve a goal."
Sustainability... is a characteristic (adjective) of a system whose functionality and interactions
are structured in a way that is "capable of being sustained."
p.7 One of the reasons why there are so many differing definitions of sustainability is that most definitions
focus on "what" is to be sustained.
p.8 The second important issue about "what" is to be sustained is to understand what is meant when we say
we want to sustain a particular ecological or social system. Do we intend to sustain its form or its function? All natural
and social systems evolve over time.
p.8 What can be sustained is the capability of the system to respond to stresses and adapt,
or its capacity to produce system outputs... An appropriate focus for sustainability is on the health or functionality
of a system, not its physical condition or characteristics in some idealized state. As a system adapts and evolves,
its functionality can be sustained for a long time.
p.8 Until we can clarify exactly what we need to do to become completely sustainable... anything
we can do to move in the direction of greater sustainability buys us time, putting off until later any natural system tipping
points and their unknown consequences.
p.11 We defined... sustainability program success... as progress in moving ecological indicators
in the direction of greater sustainability in an amount significantly different from no change... The decision to
focus on ecological indicators was based on: the importance of ecological health as a sine qua non for sustainability
p.21 The first candidate for a critical success factor suggested by our interviews is setting truly sustainable
goals... The second constraint that emerged from our interviews is not having enough of the right kind of indicators. Indicators
are important tools in the process of improving... any organizations sustainability... the group identifies things that can
be measured regularly to provide indicators of progress, or lack of progress, toward that goal... research in the management
of complex systems reveals that while outcome indicators provide an effective scorecard of results, they are not a sufficient
basis for managing sustainability programs. In addition to outcome measures, managers also need predictors of system performance
that they can use to intervene intelligently when problems arise in order to effectively influence system outcomes before
it is too late.
p.21 What our interviews revealed is generally missing in city
sustainability programs is a set of leading indicators that provide signals of system changes that will ultimately affect
the system's output, and are timely enough to allow intervention that can change the outcomes.
When properly done, these leading indicators provide insight into the state of a system's health, or functionality,
or capability.
p.22 Among the cities we reviewed, only Seattle has made an explicit attempt to build a portfolio of leading
and lagging indicators.. sustainability programs can produce greater levels of sustainability if they change their thinking
from managing for outcomes (lagging indicators) to managing for system health or functionality (leading indicators).
p.22 A second consequence of an unbalanced dependence on lagging indicators is to be fooled by early
successes, or what is sometimes called the "getting better before it gets worse"... Program managers could not see
this coming [JLJ - the collapse of the North Atlantic Cod fishery industry] because they were focused on an outcome (maximum
yield) rather than on leading indicators of fishery health. Without leading indicators, managers cannot easily distinguish
early successes from the early stages of looming failure... the common cause behind many resource management
failures is this focus on managing for a single outcome, which first improves performance, but later leads to system collapse.
p.25 the laws of natural selection allow the survival of only successful programs that are able to marshal
all the elements necessary to solve their problem
p.29 we can sustain ecological and social systems that are evolving when we understand that all
we need to do is think in terms of sustaining a system's health and functionality rather than its specific form or condition.
