Sustainable Development Goals Learning from the Past

An Approach for Sustainable Development Goals 

Learning from the Past

We know from our shortcomings on the Millennium Development Goals that we want to do things differently than we have in the past.   We might start by understanding the difference between the industrial revolution which produced an over abundance of goods quickly.  If we aspire to a sustainable future; we must change the way we think and take action in a sustainable manner.

Integration, Universality, and Differentiation

Integration - We must change the way we think (see below).  Connect things in ways that ensure the sum of all parts never exceeds the whole.  We need to ensure we connect transactions across business functions, across organizations or agencies and across geographies.  Systems Thinking offers the greatest benefits if we use international standards and systems thinking.

People changes and a series of short videos on Systems Thinking - Provided by Michael

1. Change in Thinking; Introduction
2. Change in Thinking; New Economic Age 
3. Change in Thinking; Intellectual Capital
4. Change in Thinking; Learning 
5. Change in Thinking; Monty Hall Paradox
6. Change in Thinking; System Thinking
7. Change in Thinking; Leadership

What benefits do we have in a full transition with people changes?  We need to make and assumption about the need to change and test the future we want.   See the five capabilities which have been designed to ensure a minimum viable system model.

Why? People changes are necessary but we would benefit from working on a basic model for the hardest to reach and undeveloped parts of the world.

A great resource for a shortlist of SDG's in transition according to the work published (link to source)

(viii) Stakeholders in public-private partnerships should build on the principles of inclusiveness and transparency, as well as on existing capacities, plans and exchanges, while recognizing that the effectiveness and impact of such partnerships are context-specific. Analytical work and policy dialogue on blended finance that aligns with country priorities and brings about sustainable development must urgently be accelerated, without reversing gains in quality and effectiveness.

What benefits do we have in a discreet transition leveraging public and private partnerships with civil society?  A way to scale the resources who understand transformation.  Using a tool like Sharepoint (Microsoft) which requires no software development enables scale and differentiation.

Example; Without a single development resource in fact, zero IT resources were required and the business quickly adopted a Sharepoint expense transaction capability merging five different tools in a discreet manner.  Only a few resources needed to be trained.

1 Business Resource collected the inputs from five applications and transitioned to an integrated portal using existing systems.

3 days effort from concept to sign off including a modeled version for executive visibility for the nation.

• 14 cost centers geographically dispersed from different market segments.  
• 12 million in annual marketing budget 
• 128 vendors with 11 preferred (10 million)

Proposal for an effective "Means to Implementation"
Financing for Development would map current practices into a five capability model.

Management Capabilities

• Financial Management - a chart of accounts using the six segments from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).  
• Party Management - all people in civil society and all organizations or agencies based on the real world.  
• Offer Management - all items organized as an offer or bundled in a solution.   

Transaction Capabilities

• expense transaction capability using a living enterprise concept.
• revenue transaction capability using a living enterprise concept

Universality - We need to design common business services in a way to keep the lights on.  We must make it simple and it must scale, if we do this right we can apply these general systems globally. The next topic.


We must understand general system theory and dynamics to ensure we exploit natural relationships and integrate appropriate leverage points.  For example; a country exist for every person in every part of the world.  Each country has at least one currency and often languages are common to a country.  The national laws are specific to each country-any universality would be enabled via the 1st three of six financial management segments we associate with each transaction linked to the profit and loss and chart of accounts.  In order to

Gap - Issue #1 Failed Technology Projects

Therefore, we would benefit from the out of the box functionality designed into any 3rd party accounting system and standards adoption.  Let's consider the example and one gap I've encountered far too many times.  The subject of International Standards and the constantly changing regulatory landscape.   We fail to utilize the natural functionality in 3rd party applications.  For this reason, we have an over dependency on Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW).  My first experience with report writing tools was after a failed implementation of an ERP system.  As a leader in the organizations most complex business model; I was unable to validate any of the basic or advanced business models my organization was dependent on. 

ack of adoption became evident and validated by the few certifications within the United States.  country code (ISO country code list) in any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to effectively segment and report based on country code to financial accounts using the canned reports in using the configuration use of the six codes associated with the chart of accounts

1. 
   

Understanding our current state with the needs for tomorrow

An RSA video about the divided brain concept and arguments about what we have today in our world versus what we need.  

Joseph Bohm
Implicit Right Brain - creativity and imagination
Explicit Left Brain - concrete and finite

Reductionist thinking from the industrial revolution

How do we prepare the students of the future to prepare them for work?  Look into education from the public education system.  Why teach poor or street children who are not capable of learning? 

Knowledge about the parts
Wisdom of the whole

7:00 minutes into the video
Divergent thinking is about finding many answers to a question.
Creative Thinking isn't the same thing

9:00 minutes into the video
A longitudinal study-where 98% of students who are in kindergarten at the time of the study had the capacity to be divergent thinkers.
Over time-we educated them and they gradually lost this ability.

Teachers aren't to blame-the outcomes we strive for in our current education systems are about a test score rather than teaching them to learn.

A Theory of a System for Educators and Managers

Dr. Deming and Russel Ackoff
A system science expert talks to Dr. Deming about the parts and how the parts cannot be repaired without the whole.

In school, what answer does the person whose asking expect.  We don't want students to give us an answer we want to hear.

Students learn information not acquiring wisdom.

3:45 seconds into the video
It is imperative that we understand context rather than just data. Data is fact, when we have not altered anything.

Curation is the development of information and often we confuse insights with fact.  

• Data 
• Information
• Knowledge
• Understanding 
• Wisdom

5:45 seconds into the video

Learning how to learn rather than memorize information

7:40 seconds into the video

Analysis is to separate each part and study each individually.
Corporations separate each department and this doesn't represent the system.

A system cannot understand itself

• How something works use analysis.
• Why?  Synthesis explains why.  

10:00 minutes into the video 

To manage effectively we must understand the interactions of the system.
 Making a product or delivering a service - quality will help the customer
 
Assume the system was destroyed last night-how would you replace it?  
If you don't know what to do right now, you must look at the whole.

13:00 minutes into the video 

Dr. Deming says we might remove defects to zero by redesigning the system.

14:00 minutes into the video

We do not learn by being taught.
We teach people to teach
We continue to measure value based on these economic indicators, yet we have no way to monitor the value or audit the current state of the worlds economy.

Waste - Overproduction 

A seven waste radar would help us to understand the problem we may have if we measure an individual based on the physical representation of a person, we would consider any digital or analog duplicate record about that individual would be a duplicate.

Duplicate records introduce a new "opportunity for error" and each human touch introduces a key control .

Corrective Action and Mitigation Action Planning

The source for each record must have provenance or we must maintain the source system to target dependency mapping in technology and all in person scenarios.    for root cause analysis and continuous improvement.

Each record increases the waste when incomplete or incorrect  

Duplicate records infer a step away from digital to physical world alignment.  More than one copy of the information about a person suggest further misalignment between the physical and digital worlds.

Inventory

Counting the number of times information is collected about a single person.

Why? 1.   

In the way we currently approach any new project we would identify a part of the problem and define the scope of the project. 

However, we don't want to use approaches from the past.  

“We can not solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them” Albert Einstein

Why? 2. 

We traditionally begin by addressing "a Part" of the problem. 

However, we don't wan to use the approaches from the past.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein


Evidence supporting our prescribed transformation

Millennium Development Goals