As many a keynote speaker likes to remind us, bright kids love to open

things up, to take apart alarm clocks and mechanical toys to see what is
inside. When I was growing up, my father was working as a biologist at
Burger’s Zoo, where they were building an indoor rainforest at a time
when other zoos still had a lot of tiles and cages.

I listened intently as the adults around me talked about adaptive

behaviour, carrying capacity and ecological succession, and watched
fascinated as an infestation of one ant species caused a ripple effect
through the network of predators, plants, and prey.

Those of us in mission-driven roles are finding that we are wasting our

time and money if we try to approach environmental and inequality
problems in our supply chains one by one, as zoos of old without
ecodisplays. We just can’t understand systemic problems properly that
way. As we look back at 15 years of IDH’s existence, I can frankly say
that IDH learned this the hard way.

Interconnected problems in our value chains

Ten years ago, we were working with the floriculture sector to reduce
the negative environmental and social impact of flowers produced in
Kenya, Ethiopia, Ecuador and Colombia. When we dug a little deeper, it
became evident that workers on flower farms and in factories were
underpaid. While that fundamental issue remained unsolved, the
partnership could not move towards the goals our partner companies
had set out to achieve.

Improving individual garment factories

Companies in the apparel sector were urgently looking for ways to

protect workers from exposure to hazardous chemicals, and from the
risk of factory buildings catching fire or collapsing with workers inside.
With a good partnership and some good ideas, one by one, we saw
factories becoming safer places to work where workers had their voices
heard. But in an industry that employs more than 75 million workers
globally, individual factories seemed like a drop in the ocean.

Islands of success in Vietnam’s coffee sector

In Vietnam, when we first tried to make coffee production more

environmentally friendly, we and our partners threw our efforts into
farm-level sustainability. But even when all the farms in our project
area achieved the highest level of sustainability certification,
environmental issues persisted. What were we doing wrong?
Complex problems are interconnected

With linear thinking, just as we finish fixing one problem, an even

bigger one bursts through further down the line. This is because the
problems of soil health, biodiversity and wage inequality are part of
complex, interconnected systems. If a strong trend is surging through
the system, then even a well-intentioned solution can be washed away.

The beauty of complex systems is that the inverse is also true