”We need to take action”, as Great Thunberg says in the TED-talk. Action is central in every change process. Action and different/other behaviors. It is funny in a way that we always seems to forgot that. First of January ever year it is common that we promise our self to lost some weigh. “By midsummer I will weigh 5 kg less than now”. And as time goes by and we are moving toward midsummer nothing have happened when we are standing on the scale. We always seems to forget that new results needs new behaviors. We can’t think our self in a different weight. We need to act differently, for example change behavior in what we eat and how we travel to work. We need do think and act. We need to take action as Thunberg says. It is the same with climate change. We can’t decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by just thinking and talking. We need to change our behavior and take action. For example take vacation trips closer to home, take the bicycle more often and heat are houses in wintertime’s more efficiently. 

Innovation and sustainability, for me, is closely connected to the circular process and a circular way of seeing life and society. Much of the problems we now standing in front is based on a linear thinking. A way of thinking were we have not taken the ecosystem in consideration the way we should. In an innovative process the feedback loop is essential. Therefore the circular process becomes given. To learn we need feedback. The linear process gives us feedback just ones – when we deliver. The circular process gives us feedback every time we close the feedback loop. So the innovation process should be circular and sustainability per se is circular. We need to see ourselves as part of the ecosystem not in the center of it. 

“Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines. Herein lie the beginnings of our limitations as system thinkers” writes Peter Senge in ”The fifth discipline” (1995). An important task for a human in this era is to relate to the system as a whole before creating effective islands. The system can for example be the workplace, community, the football team, the ecosystem or the family. What does it matter if a part is optimized if the whole dose not work? We can have the best tires on the bicycle but if the chain is broken it does not matter. And we can have the best bike but if there is not any roads for biking in the city it does not matter. 

If we want new results, in this case, lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, new innovations will not be enough. We also need to change our behaviors (take action), we need to go from a linear way of thinking and acting to a circular and we need all to be more of system thinker’s.