Time and Decision-Making

“The world is a place of direct and indirect feedback loops, and the kind of systems who have the fastest feedback loops can learn faster and adapt better to their environment”
(Mika Aaltonen, 2022).

Sirpa Juutinen is a Board Member of Baltic Sea Action Group and Chair of Vastuullisuuslautakunta (Sustainability Council) of the Finland Chamber of Commerce. Additionally, she hold some advisor roles e.g. in Outokumpu ESG Advisory Council and in Equilibrium (Part of FiscalNote) Sustainable Finance Committee in Singapore.

Mika Aaltonen, PhD in Economics, is an Associate Professor (Foresight & complexity) authoring of 16 books and 100 + articles on foresight, decision-making and societal change with some of the best experts and for some of the most prestigious organisations in the world. He is also Former President of Finland (2015) and Co-Founder of the Sustainable Nation Group (SNG).

Mika told us that the Sustainable Nation Group was born as a way to help nations, corporations, investors and people to make sustainable decisions. The SNG do so by establishing and maintaining new analytic capabilities, which are a combination of people and technologies, their expertise and protocols, methods and processes. Through a multidisciplinary approach they produce state-of-the-art knowledge and through powerful tools they can visualize and model it so that people can use it.

He said that in order to understand what they do it’s really important to know their philosophy, which emerged from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), and quoted “The markets, the economies and the societies emerged from bottom up, not by a single decision but when various actors, citizens, organizations, corporations, make wise decisions which are beneficial for themselves and of all those decisions the better world emerges”. He highlighted that depending on what you think is where your attention will go. In this way they put global risk assessment strategies into the table and give that information to the people of the world.

They pointed out that we are the first generation that fully understands climate change, and the last one that will be able to do something about it. With this, Mika shared with us the importance of acting now, acting wisely and, above all, to act together. Sirpa added that it’s not only about the big collective actions, but also of the individual ones, how we produce, consume and ultimately, how we live.

At this moment they are looking for investors (a minimum of 5 million euros for the next two years) and are also looking for philanthropic support of entities such as the European Union, United Nations or the Catholic Church.

Finally, Mika and Sirpa called us to take action. The former asked us to “make this planet livable for our children and grandchildren”, and the latter that “despite this is a challenging and wicked problem let’s not let it hinder us from doing it together”.