Interim Director: The 'people factor' and making room for innovation

By LOIS WRIGHT MORTON, Interim director

Whenever I use the words resilience and sustainability, I see landscapes − grasses and trees, crops and soils, rivers and creeks. However, ecological systems are not separate from human systems. People depend on ecological systems, but people’s actions also affect the conditions of these ecosystems.

The complex connections and interdependencies among these systems lead to all kinds of changes and adaptations that are not predictable, not always incremental and seldom linear. Sometimes adaptations are survival responses; other times they are simply attempts at finding a better way of doing something we’ve been doing all along.

An adaptation can change a situation totally. When the change is novel it can lead to an entirely new set of opportunities and solutions. Sometimes change fails to solve the problem or has unintended consequences. If the error is not fatal, learning takes place and can be the source of the next innovation and new possibilities.

I like to think about adaptation in terms of innovation. In Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson illustrates how the natural environment adapts, innovates and changes by taking available resources and reconfiguring them in ways that solve a problem and, in turn, create a cascading effect on surrounding systems.

Here’s an example. The beaver cuts nearby trees and builds a dam to better protect itself against its predators, transforming a forest and stream into a wetland. The new wetland attracts pileated woodpeckers who drill nesting cavities in dead trees. Wood ducks, Canadian geese, herons and kingfishers enjoy the beaver’s ‘artificial’ pond, along with frogs, lizards and other slow-water species such as dragon flies, mussels and aquatic beetles. The beaver is a keystone species (an organism that has a disproportionate effect on its ecosystem) and an ecosystem engineer.

Humans also are a keystone species and ecosystem engineers. Cultivated agricultural ecosystems testify to the disproportionate effects that human adaptive management and engineering have on other social and ecological systems. Science-based knowledge is an important cornerstone that can guide our actions, but we also must take risks and experiment with new ideas if we want to solve problems and build agricultural sustainability and ecosystem resilience.

Johnson talks about innovation in this context:
“…good ideas are not conjured out of thin air. They are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.”

Building resilience in ecosystems, improving agricultural sustainability and creating systems that provide healthful, plentiful and affordable food requires many people at the table. Innovation needs a densely populated network and one that is “plastic,” that is, a network flexible enough to try new configurations. Networks that do not change cannot form new patterns, and thus are not capable of exploring the edges of new possibilities.

For those of us in the sustainable agriculture community, this means we must engage in conversations and actions that link the entire continuum of agricultural systems and perspectives. I am talking about everything from conventional animal and cropping systems to biological farming to organic agriculture, and all the systems in between. We must find ways to build fluid networks that generate, share and store information and ideas. Otherwise, we risk being trapped, stuck in our own biases and agendas.

Johnson writes that some environments squelch new ideas while other environments seem to generate new ideas with very little effort. Martin Ruef, a Stanford Business School professor, reports finding that diverse, horizontal social networks were three times more innovative than uniform, vertical networks. Further, he suggests that groups united by shared values and long-term familiarity often led to conformity, which can dampen potential creative sparks. Connecting different perspectives, even clashing perspective, triggered new ways of thinking about problems and promoted the discovery of new possibilities and solutions.

The Leopold Center is committed to creating spaces for innovation. Many of our partnerships now serve as catalysts of cooperation and magnets for new ideas and strategies for solving problems. Our goal is to continue encouraging dialogues among people with diverse practices and fields of expertise who have a vision of a more sustainable agriculture.

The challenge is immense. We believe there are a lot of great ideas waiting to collide, cross-pollinate, and reinvent themselves. Ideas generated from our diverse networks can change how we think and act as we work to build landscape resilience and greater agricultural sustainability.

References:

Brian Walker and David Salt. 2006. Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in a Changing World. Island Press, Washington.

Steven Johnson. 2010. Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation. Riverhead Books, NY

News

Interim Director: The 'people factor' and making room for innovation