Understanding the ecosystem

With enough resource and effort, we can get results under almost any circumstances.

We can throw time and money at a process to get it started but we’ll need to constantly intervene to keep it from collapsing.

For example, ethics aside, we could keep a fish alive in a martini glass for an extended period of time if we intervened daily to change the water and prevent the buildup of ammonia.

But rarely do we want to sustain this effort in the long term, even when we want our project to endure.

We want to create projects and initiatives which sustain themselves and allow us to focus our attention elsewhere.

To achieve this, we need to ensure that we don’t just get the moving parts correct, but that we set the right conditions across the whole ecosystem.

We need to understand where entropy will wreak the most havoc and set the conditions to maximise sustainability.

This means we often need to take an ecosystem view, and to understand the interplay between the various elements.

There are lots of sources of inspiration for how we can achieve this – but nature is a pretty good teacher.

If we want to keep a fish alive in captivity, then we can learn from the ecosystem that keeps a fish alive in nature.

Nothing that we do happens in a vacuum, so if we want sustainability and longevity then we need to pay more attention to the environment. This will allow us to build projects and initiatives (and fish tanks) that sustain themselves in the long term.