The UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy recently held a call for evidence as part of its Net Zero Review; an independent review of the government’s approach to delivering its net zero targets. On the back of our Product Passport Innovations Project, and as Systems Engineers, we felt we could make a valuable contribution to this consultation, reflecting on our experience in this area and raising awareness of the systems discipline as a way of leveraging the maximum benefit for the most stakeholders. In our response we made four key points:
Complex problems require systems thinking approaches
Delivering Net Zero is complex and requires holistic stewardship. People and organisations must carefully shape and monitor change to avoid undesirable and unintended consequences. Systems thinking approaches are designed to do just this! The UK government is starting to adopt these types of approach, but care must be taken. The government’s policy-making role is to break the broad problem of sustainability into smaller and more manageable chunks that different sectors can solve. But these are still problem statements, not ‘solutions’ to sustainability. Why is this important? Because it changes how government interacts and interfaces with its stakeholders.
Insights from our recent research: incentives and barriers for business
Product Passports are mechanisms that contain information on the sustainability aspects of products and services, providing greater traceability and transparency across the product life cycle, to influence consumer and business behaviors. The EU sees passports as a regulatory innovation; a ‘solution’ where circularity and sustainability is improved by the mandatory requirement to publish and make available certain data through common product passport interfaces. But the EU is taking a wholly solution-focused approach, setting out their vision for an information platform, and specific information points to be shared across that platform, without rationale for the chosen data points. In short, they have jumped from big-picture problem to final detailed solution without exploration of the levels of abstraction in between. Only recently have they acknowledged that information must be purpose-driven. This could have been avoided if a clear systems engineering process had been followed. We hope that UK policy-making learns from these mistakes.
Widespread adoption of systems engineering within and outside of engineering disciplines
Systems Engineering is fundamental in the delivery of whole-life-cycle issues, such as those of net zero, and is time-tested in domains including healthcare, transportation, and the military. To maximize the benefits of any chosen Net Zero intervention, innovation, or technology-facilitated change, the UK government should promote, deploy, and encourage adoption of appropriate systems engineering tools by all stakeholders, to ensure the purpose of such interventions is not lost. The UK government should also avoid ‘solutionizing’ in the specification of technology and data needs, recognizing the patterns that deliver systems without tailoring those systems for a specific purpose (and thus enabling greater flexibility). Finally, the UK Government should avoid the duplication of effort, and systems existing in isolation. Integrate with existing systems and operations, rather than add additional burden. Understand ‘systems of systems’, and how to architect and integrate multiple constituent systems, that are operationally and managerially independent, together to deliver new unique capabilities that no individual system can deliver by itself.
Focus on leveraging ‘the right’ data, not big data
As information becomes increasingly digital, the ability to use data for net zero objectives greatly increases. However approaches based on “we have this data already – what can we do with it?” and “let’s collect all the data we can in case it becomes useful” is not efficient in the pursuit for big impact, fundamental change. A top-down, holistic approach is needed, that can justify why data is needed and when it can and cannot be used (what benefits it will deliver). Systems Engineering provides the cross-disciplinary basis by which such trade-offs can be managed, while systems of systems thinking can help governments better direct their interventions to maximize the benefits they desire.
To read our full response, please see below.
Dr Melanie King, Loughborough University 