Can EA save the world?

Nowadays we have developed the most complex society humanity has ever known. And we have maintained it up to this point. But technological innovation evolves like any other aspect of complexity: the investments in research and development grow increasingly complex and reach diminishing returns. That is the point where the level of profits - or benefits - gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested .

Therefore, we cannot expect continue forever to spend more and more on technological innovation when we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns. This is why Joseph Tainter, author of the book “The Collapse of Complex Societies ” argues that our system of innovation is going to change very significantly over the next decades. By the end of the century, it will not be anything like what we know today. It will have to change deeply. And it’s likely that innovation is not going to be able to solve our problems as readily as it has done to this point.

The technological optimists, and IT is plenty of them, have assumed that the productivity of innovation is either constant or increasing. In fact it is actually decreasing: IT systems are becoming more and more complex, therefore expensive to maintain. Every “solution” of today is going to become the legacy system of tomorrow. That means is that we will not forever be able to solve enterprise problems through innovation as we have done in the past 50 years.

Collapse of a society follows from the failure of its problem-solving institutions. Enterprises collapse when their investments in increasing complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. From Tainter's perspective, we are likely already past the tipping point towards collapse but just don’t know it yet.

The alternative to collapse is to start to think of the enterprise in term of sustainability and resilience, rather that short term gains and efficiency.

Sustainability requires that enterprises acquire the ability, and the inclination, to think broadly in terms of time and space. In other words, to think broadly in a geographical sense about the world around them, as well as the state of the world as a whole. And also, to think widely in time, in terms of the near and distant future.

This may be a challenge for the current corporate mind set, but the issue is rooted in the structure of our mind.

One of the major problems in sustainability and in this whole question of resources and collapse is that we did not evolve as a species to have this ability to think in systems and processes. Instead, our ancestors- who lived as hunter-gatherers - never confronted any challenges that required them to think beyond their locality and the near term.

So our species did not evolve to think broadly in terms of time and space and if we’re going to maintain our way of life, people have to learn to do so: to think extensively in terms of processes and systems; to think historically, considering also the long-term consequences of our decisions; to reflect holistically, about what’s going on in the world around us instead of the narrow way – the short sighting, silos way. Enterprise architects, as the role that considers the “big picture” need to take responsibility for broad, long term thinking and for knowing and understanding the predicament that we’re facing.