Globally, environmental impact is marked by behaviours that are dismantling our life-support systems. These harmful actions and habits have become ingrained. They capture our attention, but we find the habits impossible to break.
Goals, Economy, and Order
Obsession with themes like danger or harm, particularly fears of losing money or disrupting order, dominate people’s thoughts. While obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours can be part of daily life, they often distort otherwise useful actions or defence mechanisms meant to ensure safety, such as compulsions to focus on one thing allowing the loss of awareness of other things over time. As a result, these practiced rituals unintentionally interfere with organisational functioning; they generate waste and missed opportunities to effectively build the resilience and safety sought.
A clearer picture is emerging of the feedback loops that shape how information is prioritised and acted upon. One such loop involves goal-directed behaviour, where we analyse data to take specific actions aimed at achieving objectives, often overlooking external factors that can negatively impact the system as a whole. This has fostered a habit-based system, where actions are taken automatically based on perceived past success, without acknowledging the evolving evidence—like climate change and ecological breakdown—that this approach no longer works – if it ever did. Past errors may have been reframed to ignore what went wrong, creating waste and missing the opportunity to learn and progress. The goal-directed network has the power to inhibit the habitual one.
The contrast between these systems is evident. Under-connectivity in the goal-directed loop and over-connectivity in the habit loop often lead to stronger cycles of waste.
Shifting Between Goals and Habits
A third loop is the SV (sustainable viability) decision-making circuit, which arbitrates between goal-oriented and habitual behaviours, allowing flexibility in switching between the two. When this SV loop is impaired due to the silo effect of operational functions, it becomes difficult to disengage from habitual behaviours, leading to repetitive patterns that generate waste and missed opportunities.
The SV loop has proven its importance time and again in sustainable viable practices. When operational networks experience reduced connectivity, waste can go unnoticed. By enhancing information flow between networks organisations have successfully balanced conscious decision-making with automatic habits. This means that by the integration of fresh habits formed through the sustainable viability of the Sphere Economy organisations have driven bankable performance by eliminating waste and uncovering new opportunities. It follows they have developed greater participative management that has bred cultures and systems that, for example, do not feel threatened by error but see the insights and value they bring.
Understanding Causality
A component of sustainably viable organisational health is understanding causality and wholeness and has proven to be key to boosting low impact financial returns.
Causality helps explain how things work and how we perceive the world – the environment and its relationships between and around us. It prompts us to ask, “Why does this happen?” For example, in information theory (firmly established by Claud Shannon in the 1940’s)1, cause and effect are connected by the flow of information. But without proper sequencing of decisions, and participative resource management, causality becomes distorted. It is isolated from its environment. As a result, the information about a particular object and actions becomes vague and less accurate. Let’s consider the relationship of cause and effect more specifically: A causes B can be reduced to a sequence of events—A1, A2, A3. B can be divided similarly. By analysing these sequences, we gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on and / or wrong. For example, A1 might cause B1, B2 could trigger A2, while B3 actually leads to A3. This three-dimensional approach not only delivers more information, but insights to its flow around systems. It follows, the approach of the Sphere Economy does not set out to repair the existing system, but reform it to enable better information pathways that can result in greater profit, better management of resources, and better motivated teams.
Conclusion
The Sphere Economy helps break down dissociation of rigid linear thinking caused by disrupted information flows. As a result, it has shown to reduce waste, cost and risk. It offers a viable addition to managing financial, operational, and supply chain systems and result in better low impact sustainably viable operational performance.