Choose Topics

8. Achieving the 17 SDG's

This whitepaper started with a brief description of The Fundamentals of Life: Diversity, Reciprocity and Temporality. We should try to anticipate these three ancient wisdoms in order to achieve the 17 interconnected Sustainable Development Goals and sustain our common future. I also pointed out that the SDGs are exhausting in their complexity and hardly manageable in daily practice. To achieve the goals I introduced two solutions:

  1. Three BigTopics (Inclusion, Circular Economy and Digitisation) to simplify and contextualise the SDGs
  2. The Sustainability Games: A manageable and measurable approach to engage, educate and activate any workforce on the BigTopics

Sustainable Development and our common future

Essentially sustainable development is about the sustainability of everything. Everything is connected in a complex of interacting systems called life. The 17 Sustainable Developments Goals - an accomplishment by the global community which should be appreciated as such - try to address this complexity. That makes them comprehensive and powerful but unmanageable and unpractical at the same time.

The Fundamentals of Life and the BigTopics

We should not forget that the SDGs are goals and they don't necessarily include the ways to achieve them. Achieving them is a matter of developing the capabilities to anticipate the way life works in a sustainable manner. I described how life works based on the The Fundamentals of Life. Life is about diversification (diversity) and absorbing the difference (reciprocity) to compose and decompose over and over again (temporality).

Anticipating these fundamentals might still sound a bit unpractical. So I tried to translate their principles to actual, practical and appealing topics: Diversity & Inclusion, Circular Economy and Decentralised Digitisation. And the beautiful bonus of this synthesis is that the Fundamentals of Life also form the connection between the SDG's and the three BigTopics.

Learn to anticipate: competency ànd culture

Anticpating is something that comes spontaneously, but can also be learned. Becoming consciously capable. Engage, educate and apply. Learn and practice. Fail, adjust and Improve. Plan-do-check-act. It's all learning. And what you learn is not only acquiring knowledge and skills, it also is a cultural way of saying: "This way, let us sustain our common future collectively." So just learn to apply the big topics on a sustainable manner and you will achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Gamified Benchmark: to measure progress

The Sustainability Games framework supports the cultural and competency adoption of sustainability (big topics en sdgs) in your organisation. Developing the anticipation capability of the organisation is a also measurable journey. The Sustainability Games incorporates a benchmark that matches capability with impact.

Capability is the best indicator of the ability (of human capital) to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.