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Center for Effective Organizations

Research

Organizing for Sustainable Success

For the last 30 years, effectiveness has largely been defined in terms of traditional competitive and financial outcomes. During the next 30 years the definition of organizational effectiveness will expand to reflect the profound interdependence of company economic viability with issues of societal and ecological sustainability. Despite the recent increase in company attention to sustainability, little is known about designing organizations to address the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Sustainable success requires finding ways to deal with the complex interdependencies and trade-offs inherent in the global economy, managing the tensions among various interests, and finding approaches to mitigate the undesirable ecological outcomes of current competitive models. These issues are messy and global--and will inevitably pull in stakeholders well beyond investors and employees. Tackling these messy global issues requires new organizing approaches, among them the building of constellations of organizations coming together in coordinated effort. We believe the future of organizational effectiveness includes designing sustainable organizations capable of accomplishing the triple bottom line.

Many questions will have to be addressed, including:

  • What approaches enable companies to embrace not only financial outcomes at a point in time and space, but also far-reaching social and environmental outcomes that create the context for sustainable effectiveness?
  • What organizing approaches allow the cross boundary collaboration that will be required to deal with these issues effectively?
  • How do multi-stakeholder participants achieve sufficient agreement on purpose to coordinate work and resources and achieve sustainability outcomes?
  • What does this mean for how companies manage their human and other resources?
  • What is the appropriate role of the HR function as organizations gravitate to this broader view of effectiveness?

CEO is embarking on a new research area that focuses on design for sustainable performance. Despite the recent increase in company attention to sustainability, little is known about designing organizations to address the triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Tackling these messy global issues requires new organizing approaches, among them the building of constellations of organizations coming together in coordinated effort. It also requires addressing the changing ways that work is done in the global, highly connected economy, and the challenges this poses for our traditional assumptions about organizing. Based on our special interest group meeting in October, 2008, of companies and other stakeholders involved in sustainability activities, we are now building and expanding this community of interest to conduct collaborative research. We envision that these studies will lead to the generation of cases, tools, field manuals and publications to provide practical organization design guidance to organizations focusing on sustainable performance.

Our first focus will be on Sustainable Health Care, and we invite people who are in organizations that are exploring ways to deliver health care sustainably to contact us and learn more about participating. This may include traditional health care delivery systems, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and other organizations that are working with the health care sector to change the mode and efficiency of health care delivery. Our aim is to paint a broad picture of the health care eco-system and the organizational and inter-organizational approaches that will increase its performance in delivering value to society, corporations, communities and individuals. Please contact Sue Mohrman or Chris Worley if you are interested in being part of this exploration.

We will also be initiating studies that more broadly focus on organizational approaches to enhancing sustainable effectiveness. If your organization has substantive initiatives in this direction, either alone or in partnership with other organizations, we would be interested in exploring possible participation in a community of inquiry, Again, please contact Sue or Chris to express interest and get connected with this initiative.

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