In his book Ways of Being, writer and author James Bridle warns,
One of the greatest misunderstandings of the twentieth century, which persists into the present, was that everything was ultimately a decision problem….We treat the world as something to be computed, and thus amenable to computation. We think of it as something which can be broken down into discrete points of data and fed into machines. We believe the machine will give us concrete answers about the world which we can act on, and confers upon those answers a logical irrefutability and a moral ability and a moral impunity. From this error flows all kinds of violence: the violence which reduces the beauty of the world to numbers, and the consequent violence which tries to force the world to conform to that representation, which erases, degrades, tortures and kills those things and beings which do not fit within the assumed system of representation.37
As finance professionals, we have all been guilty, at times, of viewing everything as a ‘decision problem’. However, by fostering a sustainability mindset we can change our focus to ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’38