Accelerating sustainability with lean leadership

Abstract

The need for enterprises to fulfill the call for sustainability responsibilities is evident in all sectors, such as with green production and service processes, concurrent engineering (Felder n.d.), cradle-to-cradle design and triple bottom line strategy, design and performance (McDonough and Braungart in Cradle to cradle: Rethinking the way we make things. North Point, New York, 2002a, b). The Fourth Industrial Revolution, known as Industry 4.0, provides advanced technological assistance, ranging from the Internet of Things to the Digital Twin to Artificial Intelligence, all with hopes of eliminating waste and increasing sustainability of the organization and the planet. These technological innovations are providing a platform for enterprise transformation. However, few of the aspirations of the innovations and disruptors driven by machine and technical systems will be possible in the next decades if the needs of the human systems of organizations are not leveraged in a congruent way through a System of Systems perspective. The past failures of not comprehending the complexities of the human system interfaces with machines and technology provide a clear roadmap as to where organizations cannot afford to travel in the future (Amen et al. in Mechanical engineering 133(12), 2011).