I have been reading the Ecosystem Restoration Playbook – a practical guide to healing the planet, developed for World Environment Day 2021 to kick off the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021-2030)

I do like the explanation of Ecosystems, lifted from the restoration playbook (see below). There is some real contradiction to how business applies the ecosystem thinking, and this post attempts to look at the differences and implications of treating ecosystems differently. This use of “ecosystems” is degrading as much as we are in our Natural Systems, mostly in the eventual resource depletion and our insatiable consumption.

By taking this business thinking of Ecosystems into continually pushing for greater consumer consumption is a growing problem. We are at a time when we need to place a break on this, and take a different position of replenishing or restoring what we have, and reuse it. With our drive for continued growth consumption and exploitation, we are compounding our planet’s problems.

I wanted to explore some differences within Natural Ecosystems and how Business uses Ecosystems to search for growth, scale, and dominance. We are in need to change our consumption habits and business growth models.

This is not a definitive list. It is more to stop and reflect where we are heading on applying ecosystem thinking, perhaps addressing its accepted context or adapting it to fit its new one being push in the business world.

To quote from the Ecosystem Restoration Playbook to start this thinking off here in this post:

“Ecosystems are the web of life on Earth. An ecosystem comprises all the living organisms and their interactions and their surroundings in a given place. They exist at all scales, from a grain of soil to the entire planet, and include forests, rivers, wetlands, grasslands, estuaries and coral reefs. Cities and farmlands contain important human-modified ecosystems.

Ecosystems provide us with priceless benefits. They include a stable climate and breathable air, supplies of water, food and materials of all kinds, and protection from disaster and disease. Natural ecosystems are important for our physical and mental health and for our identity. They are home
to precious wildlife. For many, they are a source of wonder and spirituality.

All over the world, ecosystems face massive threats. Forests are being cleared; rivers and lakes polluted; wetlands and peatlands drained; coasts and oceans degraded and overfished; mountain soils eroded, and farmlands and grasslands overexploited.

Unless we change our ways and protect and restore our ecosystems, we will not only destroy the landscapes we love; we will undermine the foundations of our own well-being and bequeath a degraded, inhospitable planet to future generations.

Earth needs help. The climate emergency, the loss of nature and deadly pollution threaten to destroy our homes and eliminate many of the millions of species that share this beautiful planet with us.

But this degradation is not inevitable. If we act now, we have the power and knowledge to reverse the harm and restore the Earth.

That is why the United Nations has declared the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Starting on World Environment Day 2021, individuals, groups, governments, businesses and organizations of all kinds can join forces in a global movement to prevent, halt and reverse ecosystem degradation and secure a sustainable future for all.

Healthy ecosystems are vital to meeting those goals. Restoring them is a massive challenge. But more and more people realize that we must change our ways and move urgently to protect and rebuild nature for the sake of future generations and out of love for the world we live in

As well as fixing ecosystems on the ground, let’s give them a break. It is our massive collective environmental footprint that is degrading nature.

We can tread more lightly by changing what we do, what we consume, and the waste we leave behind.

Over the next ten years, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration will bring together governments, businesses, science and academia, and every concerned citizen to restore our planet.”

Protecting our ecosystems is essential and why this push for restoration becomes so vitally important.

The importance of what we need to do, reverse what we have been destroying in our natural ecosystems, needs all of us to find out how we can contribute.

But this playbook got me thinking about the differences between Natural Ecosystems and Business or Innovation Ecosystems.

I wanted to stop and think about the differences but also on some of the dangers of the ways we are conceiving business ecosystems that we are deploying today.

Ecosystems need re-stating for business. Are they real ecosystems?

Applying “Ecosystems” to everything is in itself degrading the understanding of its true intent, Ecosystems need to be appreciated as vital and essential.

We call something an “ecosystem”, which seems to provide a rubber stamp of being politically correct and current. Simply stating “we” is just opening up our thinking for outsiders to contribute.

What we are really doing to further grow out today’s business is to recognize the “network effect“. Many businesses claiming “ecosystem” are in fact taking open innovation and placing a greater emphasis on open networking to seek out diverse ideas.  The more connections, the greater the diversity potential and bringing different ideas or views into the thinking and possibly deriving more value; this a not a good interpretation of ecosystems.

I wonder if we have often just taken to the word “Ecosystem” the same as “Innovation”; it can and often does mean different things to different people.

They both convey the purpose of new growth intent. Still, business seems to me to so often simply offers these as “greenwashing”, conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company’s products are changing to attain stakeholder approval.

We do need to think about ecosystems in a deliberate design

Applying a level of ecosystem thinking really does allow opening up the (internal) thinking to more diverse, open thinking. This appreciation allows for greater collaboration and appreciation of each party’s contribution.

The need within the building out of any business ecosystem in the future has to think about the notion of the circular economy.

The Ellen Macarthur Foundation does an excellent job of describing this circular economy asking the question: “What will it take to transform our throwaway economy into one where waste is eliminated, resources are circulated, and nature is regenerated?”

Also, we are in urgent need of building a much greater appreciation of what Sustainability means. I wrote this “Reshaping the core of your business through a focus on Sustainability“. It gives a helpful set of values and attributes needed in taking a sustainability approach.

Just let’s hope “sustainability” does not become another catch-all word like “ecosystems” or “innovation” has become; overused, undervalued, and not fully understood on its significance to build a business differently. It is so often just promising growth by liberally applying this and not recognizing this requires fundamental changes in business design, resources and strategic thinking.

Let me take some differences I see between Natual and Business Ecosystems

So drawing from the points made in this Ecosystem Restoration Playbook and looking for (immediate) differences.

-Businesses tend to designs Ecosystems as “competitive forces”, not valuing “competing forces” that need consideration.

-Business ecosystems are looking to “transform” the landscape in a given time, whereas Ecosystems are “evolving” over a given time.

-Business ecosystems tend to ‘force’ change; they impose it. Within Natural Ecosystems, those more dominant species or plants, trees etc., also can impose themselves. Still, it is more based on natural evolution, not a forced one, unless something (mostly humans) intervenes to alter the balance radically, often not anticipating the consequences.

-Business ecosystems seem mostly not to want to conserve, consolidate and balance; they are looking to change, redesign and disturb the existing radically to produce more.

-Ecosystem design should protect, nurture and grow out the existing, but often, as in the business case, it is very self-centred. The intent is to (re)build its position with the intention of being dominant or gain a superior advantage.

-Business Ecosystems look to be agile, responsive to rapid change and disruption and gain that faster “speed to market”. Natural ecosystems react and respond but at different evolutionary speeds, adapting over time to their changing circumstances.

-Partnerships are sought out in both a natural ecosystem and a business one. The difference is that the natural one is looking for being self-sustaining but recognizing its reliance on dependencies. In business partnerships, the need is to specifically search for diverse and complementary capabilities, to advance a radically different position and build a more dominating market positioning.

-In a business ecosystem, companies fight for the best partners, technologies and networks to create, build and defend added value. Equally, in a natural ecosystem, there is the survival of the fittest to determine existing value. Yet, we need to often not think about all the different “dynamics” within the communities formed or being formed and future consequences or changes.

-The business ecosystem is looking to develop that outside-in philosophy of finding new value, whereas the natural one is more of an inside-out, already showing and maintaining its value.

We can adapt and have an effective navigation system to adjust or shift to constantly “maximise value” in business ecosystems. In contrast, a natural ecosystem has its place that can and does evolve, but maximising can disturb and actually, eventually destroy.

The business ecosystem is characterized by several unique attributes that I can see evolving.

• To be highly effective in today’s competitive world, business ecosystems require perhaps hundreds of collaborators.
• The collaboration is enabled by a digital thread, as its pulse
• Collaborations seek the not so obvious partners within the network
• Evolution needs to be rapid, relationships shift and mature as the recognition of finding the competitive advantage gathers in pace or shows signs of early failure

There are some challenges and contradictions that need evaluating

-The sharing, exchanges of information and intelligence needs a created IP framework, whereas we, as humans, struggle to find the connection dependencies in natural ecosystems. Often we interfere and destroy the balance

-Business Ecosystems are there in design to transform; regretfully, in the natural ecosystems, we as humans have imposed and transformed far too much that we are at that point of crisis.

Ecosystems are important, as the Ecosystem Restoration Playbook – a practical guide to healing the planet, suggests.

Redefining Ecosystems into their different types.

I do like one reference I found that overall, there are four major types of ecosystem services: provisioning, regulating, supporting and cultural.

Ecosystem services are all the processes and outputs that nature provides us with. These include provisioning services (food, water), regulating services (wastewater treatment, pollution control), supporting services (shelter), and cultural services (recreation and tourism).

Now, what if we similarly defined business ecosystems? Provisioning services, regulating services. supporting services and cultural.

That might be an interesting way to define business ecosystem approaches as well, and they can evolve by being more specifically designed on their business or societal intent.

Ecosystems are so important; as we seek these in business, we might want to reflect on the need for sustainability.

Ecosystems are the web of life on Earth. The growing realization within the business that this Ecosystem thinking, adjusted for its purpose and needs, is perhaps offering a different future for sustaining what is there but at what long-term cost?

My final thoughts here

My final thought is taken from the Millennium Development Assessment in 2005 on Ecosystems and Human Well-Being on the first two of their main findings in my ecosystem evaluations.

– Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, freshwater, timber, fibre, and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.
– The changes made to ecosystems have contributed to substantial net gains in human well-being and economic development. Still, these gains have been achieved at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services, increased risks of nonlinear changes, and the exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people. These problems, unless addressed, will substantially diminish the benefits that future generations obtain from ecosystems.

Perhaps by adopting ecosystems the way we are in business, in this constant search for new growth and the higher impact, we are accelerating the further depletion of precious resources in a consumption-driven society. Ecosystems need to strive to have a (careful) balance; otherwise, we can have serious long-term unintended consequences.

We need to take care as we promote the concept of sustainability within business ecosystems, which we are or will be doing.

We need to give back more than we take out of them, our ecosystems. That requires a more sustainable approach (referring back to a previous post of mine) in any full consideration of any business ecosystem design.