This year, I've been working with Presidio Graduate School (the new name for Presidio School of Management) to develop an online introduction to Sustainable Management. The course won't be available until the end of the year but out of this development has come a further clarification of the many disparate parts of the sustainability agenda. In particular, and in collaboration with we've organized Hunter Lovins and Nicola Acutt, we've defined a new organization of these elements into a more clear model I've been calling "The Presidio Model."

This isn't "official" yet but it's been such a helpful way to characterize this field that I've begun to use it to teach with already. No doubt, there are still several details to work-out but I thought I'd share where we are so far. The part in green is really this Presidio Model and the rest represents what I add, specifically, around sustainable design (though it also should help other professionals understand how to make sustainable change happen in their organizations).

Sustainability Principles:
Systems Perspective:

• Diversity = Resilience
• Centralization & Decentralization
• Competition & Cooperation
• Social, Cultural, Economic, and Environmental Vitality
• Multiple Stakeholder Engagement

Customer-centric Engagement

Sustainability Frameworks:

• Natural Capitalism
• The Natural Step™
• Cradle to Cradle (this includes both Stahel's original approach and McDonough & Braungart's later one)
• Holistic Management

Sustainability Tools:

• Sustainability Helix
• LCA (Life Cycle Assessment)
• Total Beauty™ Metrics
• Biomimicry Design Spiral
• SROI (Social Return on Investment)
• Blended Value

(This is actually the tip of a very long list. Some tools are industry-specific, others are metrics, and there are many new ones being developed all of the time).

Sustainable Design Strategies:
Reduce:

• Design for Use & Meaning
• Dematerialization (Materials, Energy, & Transportation)
• Substitution (Energy, Materials)
• Localization
• Transmaterialization (Products into Services)
• Informationalization (Physical Products into Digital Products)

Reuse:

• Design for Durability
• Design for Reuse

Recycle:

• Design for Disassembly
• Closing the Loop
• Design for Effectiveness

Restore:

• Redesign Systems

This is largely represented in the book (Design is the Problem) but there's some fine-tuning in the model that's not represented in the book. In particular, the model differentiates between the 8 frameworks in the book and splits these into 3 frameworks and 5 tools (all in the list above). Other than this distinction, the information in the book is the same. I'm hoping that on the next printing of the book, we can easily make this distinction.