Is robustness the third way to build sustainable organisations?

On a hot day at the end of June, the most motivated GUBERNA members gathered in Wavre for the already fifth edition of our Summer School. Once again our life-long learning team organised a fruitful  day of study, reflection and dialogue on an important governance trend.

In his keynote Prof. Dr. Olivier Hamant, a renowned director of research at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Lyon (INRAE), challenged us to fundamentally rethink our approach to build more robust companies in times of fluctuations and growing uncertainty.  Hamant’s academic work, which intersects biology, physics, and mathematics, offers us profound new insights for navigating businesses in our unpredictable world.  

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Prof. Dr. Olivier Hamant is also a research associate at Kumamoto University, and at Cambridge University where he is the editor-in-chief of the open access journal, Quantitative Plant Biology, which promotes systems thinking and citizen science in plant biology. Olivier Hamant is currently heading the Michel Serres institute. 

Not an ordinary keynote

In short, Hamant argues that the obsession with performance, defined by achieving goals with minimal resources, is ingrained in our political and economic systems. However, this fixation often increases unpredictable fluctuations and risk, and reduces adaptability. He claims that we should not longer cling to the myths of optimal performance and relentless growth, driven by a belief in achieving maximum.

Instead of relentlessly pushing for tighter controls with more efficacy and efficiency, we should prioritize Adaptability and robustness. This means shifting from a narrow focus on ‘weakening optimisation’ to a broader understanding of sustainability and stability. By learning from the natural world and adopting a holistic perspective, we can better navigate the complexities of our world in flux.

 

The looming challenges

In today’s rapidly changing landscape, crises—whether social, ecological, or geopolitical—can erupt unexpectedly, leaving us grappling with their aftermath. Natural ecosystems also are paying the cost of our performances. As board director, you’re well aware of the mounting pressures in this turbulent and fluctuating century:

  • Resource scarcity: With the global population expanding, the strain on our finite resources is intensifying.
  • Climate crisis: We are perilously close to surpassing the 2-degree Celsius increase in global temperatures, risking severe storms and irreversible environmental damage.

  • Biodiversity collapse: The accelerating loss of species disrupts ecosystems, and most importantly, weakens the natural services we rely on, from clean water, CO2 capture, soil regeneration to pollination. 

  • Environmental degradation: Pollution is degrading the planet’s health, impacting air quality, soil fertility, and marine life. 

These issues are not just distant threats but immediate challenges that may demand a fundamental shift in our governance approach. Healthy ecosystems are the backbone of our planet, providing essential services that sustain life. The robustness of these systems is tied to their biodiversity. As we lose species, the resilience of these systems diminishes, putting our future at greater risk. Our efforts to control and optimize every aspect of our world have led to these unintended consequences and ironically, to lose control. Would it be more constructive to recognize the limits of our ability to predict and manage the complex dynamics of the planet?.Olivier Hamant proposes arguments based on scientific evidence in favour of this approach. And the crucial question he raises is: how to live in a fluctuating world?

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The Darwinian lesson: robustness over performance

Nature offers valuable lessons in surviving a fluctuating environment. Living organisms have evolved by prioritizing robustness. Their ability to adapt to changing conditions has been honed over millions of years, ensuring their survival, not through peak performance but through adaptability. While we must be cautious in directly applying biological principles to human societies, we can draw essential lessons from nature’s approach. Living systems thrive through diversity, redundancy, incompleteness and what may appear as inefficiency. These attributes contribute to robustness—the capacity to maintain stability amid constant change. Scientific evidence shows that we can't be robust AND performant at the same time. 

The trap of efficiency and performance

Our current path is fundamentally flawed. Initiatives like green growth and smart cities, despite their progressive veneer, often reinforce the same outdated principles of performance and optimization. They perpetuate a cycle where efficiency is mistaken for sustainability, and productivity is sought at the expense of long-term stability. This focus on performance leads to counterproductive outcomes

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Questioning deeply held values

We must challenge the deep-seated value of efficiency. The drive for performance often triggers a rebound effect, where the gains from efficiency lead to increased consumption and further resource depletion. For example, advancements in energy-saving technologies frequently result in higher overall energy use due to new demands and applications. Furthermore, our narrow focus on solving specific problems, such as decarbonization, can exacerbate other issues like biodiversity loss and resource scarcity, creating a cascade of unintended consequences.

We need a fundamental shift in our values and actions, moving from a performance-centric mindset to one that embraces robustness. Robust systems are not optimized for continuous peak performance but are designed to endure and adapt. 

By the way, all along his speech Hamant presented his “food for thought” messages  with compelling slides and strong quotes:  “Use time to save matter”, “Recarbonize the economy” (remembering that we now know how to build batteries from recycled organic products), “Let production feed ecosystems, rather than use ecosystems to increase production”,  “Systems can only change from their periphery”. Or this one: “Performance is useful in itself, but it needs constant adjustments and new limits, while robustness paves the way towards long-term success.”  

Learning from the living world

Biological systems provide a model for how we might rethink our approach. For instance, plants in photosynthesis are not the most efficient converters of solar energy, yet they are robust because they can cope with fluctuations in light and temperature. And the push for higher efficiency in agriculture through monocultures increases the vulnerability of the systems that feeds us to disease and climate fluctuations, whereas diverse systems with a bigger variety of crops offer greater resilience against environmental stresses compared to monocultures. 

These principles can extend beyond the natural world to inform how we design our organizations and companies. We should build systems that are adaptable, heterogeneous, and capable of absorbing shocks, rather than striving for ever-greater efficiency! 

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Internal audits

Hamant then challenged the audience to a group discussion: Think about the counter- performances of your own organisation and identify how they increase robustness”. For the debriefing he had prepared this wonderful slide  perfectly illustrating the mindset change that a path towards robustness can cause (“when operating such a shift keep in mind that you don't start from a white paper: think to QUESTION!”)

Some of these challenging issues can be linked to concepts that are inherent to a dynamic governance. ome of these challenging issues can be linked to concepts that are inherent to a dynamic governance. Such as creative thinking, authentic leadership, strategic planning, active participation, embracing diversity, team cohesion, exploring new sources, and recycling for long term sustainability, …?   

5 Points to Remember

  • Darwinian Insight: competitive performance cannot be the sole metric for success. Nature prioritizes robustness as the way forward to maintain the stability of the system.
  • Efficiency trap: The relentless drive for more efficacy and efficiency is unsustainable. More control, more KPI  indicators, more regulation, more accountability can become counterproductive.
  • Shift in values: We should foster or embrace diverse systems that are adaptable, redundant  and robust  rather than narrowly optimized and rigid. Our survival and prosperity for the future depend on this shift.
  • Goodhart Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be reliable.
  • Ask robust questions: Slow down your thinking process to deeply consider the best course of action. Increase your business by systematically seeking out the right robust questions. (“Often, you have the most brilliant answers to wrong questions“) Reevaluate your starting points and dare to question your assumptions.
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How to Protect the environment?

After lunch, Antoine Lebrun, CEO of the Pairi Daiza Foundation took over and enumerated some practical advice in his talk about Governing in ecosystems: courses of action for robust organisation. He illustrated our negative impact on the environment and referred to some alarming facts in the Living Planet index.

He called for focused actions with real impact:

  • Let’s focus on adaption, accepting the inevitable losses
  • Let’s focus our efforts on the habitats and species with the best chance of survival, protect them with strength and conviction.

He then initiated a workshop focused on preparing your company for fluctuations. The key question was clear: To build your organization to thrive in turbulence, what risks, opportunities, and bottlenecks do you see in resources, transformations, interactions, and drivers? But we can not divulge the personal and confidential testimonials of the participants.

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Theory vs practice

In the final panel discussion, we juxtaposed the theory of governance related to sustainability and robustness with its daily practice. Antoine Lebrun interviewed Ilse Tant, independent director at De Watergroep, Pascal Laffineur, CEO at Yuma, Pierre Hermant, CEO finance&invest.brussels and Salvatore Iannello, Executive director at Chocolaterie Galler. Each panelist was challenged to provide insights on how they addressed different problems and challenges of governance linked to sustainability & robustness. This resulted in authentic and confronting testimonials, from which we could compile a long list of positive constructive steps along governance concepts such as: 

  • On a board level: adopting a more open governance structure, challenging a governance tripod in which each decision body plays its role with complementary added value, building a company purpose that makes sense at all levels of the company and in its ecosystem, implementing new risk management models, ensuring adequate and adapted board best practices, fostering diverse and inclusive teams, creating sustainability reporting frameworks, providing high-level education for board members, enhancing valuable board-management interactions, focusing more on long-term impacts, performing stress tests on the organisation.. 
  • On a stakeholder level: establishing meaningful company purpose, developing collaborative models and partnerships, , engaging in an open and engaging dialogue with shareholders and stakeholders throughout the entire value chain, embarking on a 5P journey (People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnerships) - Ethics is there an important compass and help in the arbitrage: you need to be profitable to be a 5Ps company, prioritizing societal interests, , adapting to climate change, defining clear value creation, shifting towards transparent business ethics, promoting collegiality, building trust, governing the commons, committing to a conscious integrity…  

 

Final thought

Afterward, we learned that participants really enjoyed the novel, biology-based perspective on robustness Several were eager to debate it further, but unfortunately, the professor could not attend the afternoon session...

Let’s continue our efforts and focus on real impact! Better Boards, better organisations, better world! You can find a few resources for further reflection below 

Antidote to the cult of performance. Robustness from nature       Construire la robustesse  Adieu la performance, place à la robustesse?

Enjoy your summer and see you soon!