Workshop results for "What are the qualities of a sustainable action/product/system?"

We explored the question "What are the qualities of a sustainable action/product/system?" in a workshop format. The Consensus Workshop process, developed by ICA builds ideas gradually, starting from brainstorming individually to sharing ideas in pairs, until finally coming together as a whole group to organize and name six or seven answers to this question.

So for our Friday RIE group, the qualities of a sustainable action/product/system are:
it Circulates, it's an Essential Good, it's Powerful, it's Continuous, it's Human Oriented, and it involves Extensive Exploration.

After coming up with these qualities, we spent time in a discernment or decision-making process. To begin with, each person marked the final named columns with an L if they liked the idea, a C if they felt challenged, and an E where they felt excited about the concept and wanted to look into it more. (No limit to how many you could mark)

Marked "Like":
Essential Good (6), Powerful (4), Continuous (2), Human Oriented (5), Extensive Exploration (1)

Marked "It challenges me":
Essential Good(1), Powerful (2), Human Oriented (4), Extensive Exploration (3)

Marked "Interested in exploring this":
Powerful (2), Human Oriented (3), Extensive Exploration (4)

And then we sat together and had a fascinating discussion. The quality "human oriented" created a lot of discussion, because of questions of the fairness of the sustainability process to different people, and the fact that people are not especially consistent.
A key question emerged, "Who or what is sustainability for?" If sustainability is not 'human oriented' is it then 'profit oriented'? Or 'animal oriented'? We even briefly touched on, "why do we want sustainability?" But it seemed the majority of the group strongly feels that sustainability is not only something we want to face, but something we have no choice about: sustainability is the way forward into the future.