Inasmuch as boundaries between disciplines are unhelpful, so too are those between business and scholarly enquiry. CFG thrives because of the easy origination and passage of ideas between these two seemingly quite different domains.
CFG is also all about Systems Thinking, with its roots going back — in CFG’s case — to the kinds of studies conducted at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) since the late 1970s.
This substantial experience is now being utilized in sustainability assessments of private- and public-sector enterprises, training and education programs, and leadership seminars.
Enterprise Assessment & Profiles
Multi-sectoral Systems Analysis (MSA) and associated software.
Originally developed for tracking the flows of materials and money around the regional economy and metabolism of the city of Atlanta within the Chattahoochee watershed, MSA is now being applied to London and other locations. MSA assesses and identifies promising engineering and enterprise innovations — promising, that is, as new “parts” in the currently existing “whole” of urban infrastructure and economy. To this end, CFGnet maintains comprehensive technology and enterprise data bases.
| CFGnet software |
Insights
We have views: on the contemporary debate surrounding Sustainability and Cities. They are posted elsewhere — see Insights. They are often stimulated by what we are told we either cannot or should not do. We may be interested in the sustainability of say the water sector. But that does not mean there are no interventions we might better make in say, the food or energy sector, to the great benefit in turn of the water sector itself (and vice versa). This is why we have the MSA, driven by the Systems Thinking at the core of CFGnet.
Periodically the Network will be publishing a Sustainability Performance Review Report on businesses, utilities, cities, organizations, and so on.
| 1-15 Report Card |
Seminars & Workshops
“Cities as Forces for Good in the Environment: The Business Case”.
This is essentially a Seminar conducted as the classical skills workshop in which master craftsmen, journeymen, and apprentices engage through a team effort in the passing on of skills and mutual learning — about Systems Thinking.
The “Sustainability Agora”.
Previously hosted within the setting of the World Water Congresses of the International Water Association, the Agora is carefully staged in the manner of good-humored theater, as a microcosm of learning for good governance — the kind of governance that should be enabling of the engineering and policy interventions of CFG.
| CFGnet seminars |