At key points in the year, we all have critical decisions to make over the allocations of budgets, resources, direction of strategic goals. But on what basis are these decisions made? Professionals use increasingly the concept of sustainability, both as a starting point – ‘is our organisation sustainable?’ – and as an end point - ‘we are seeking to be a leading sustainable organisation’ – when trying to make decisions on funding. This pre-supposes that we all agree on what makes a sustainable organisation.

Our choice of the word ‘sustainable’ in relation to organisation is worth comparing with some of the other terms used in relation to the turning-around of organisations in crisis. ‘Sustainable’ does not mean quite the same as ‘ideal’ or ‘healthy’, although we use both these terms in our attempts to design a template for the sort of business outcomes we consider desirable. The problem with prescribing an ideal or a healthy business outcome as an aim is that both these images are essentially static. They describe an end state, while in reality business is fluid, dynamic, always changing and very difficult to freeze in time. It is simply not possible to stop an organisation shifting and developing. Some areas prosper and thrive, but others fall mysteriously into disunity, even dereliction.

 

Given the fluidity and changing nature of the surface of any business, it can seem complex to analyse, shifting and difficult to quantify. All types of organizations change over time, groups that were once strong seem to have vanished, new sections or priorities are everywhere and the rules of formation and stability are not immediately obvious. When talking about sustainability projects, we often employ gardening metaphors of growth, flowering, dying back, regenerating. These capture the organic nature of organisational dynamics but miss out two other key characteristics - the way they operate as closed systems, and the permanence of organisational structures beneath apparent flux.

 

Over time it is clear that business organisations renew and develop themselves in a far from random or unpredictable way. Beneath the changing surface, as individual players come and go, lie some standard structures found in virtually all organisations. In the area of operation between the business and the formal systems that govern our work, group networks and traditions develop slowly over time among those who share the same locality. There are thousands of small medium enterprises forming and reforming all of the time at this level. They enrich local life and bring added value to a local economy.

 

Sustainability means that there are mechanisms for a constant cycle of renewal of business management. Because it is no easy task to understand how organisations function, as both fluid yet fixed, chaotic yet structured, we end up in tangles when trying to describe the Utopian organisation. Ironically the strength of the organisation’s own systems, or networks are one of the most crucial indicators of business sustainability, and unfortunately very rarely used as a measure of ‘success’.

 

We currently rely heavily on traditional economic information such as profit and loss to assess business health. But this is not ‘sustainability’ we need to consider the organisation in a much broader framework. We need to be able to say not just that a business is doing well financially but which specific bits of the total organisation are doing well, the social dynamics, the environment impact, the wellbeing, and of course the integration across the issues, and understand the systems which may need intervention. It is simply not true that if one area of organisation is in bad shape, the others are too. Some of the most economically deprived organisations in rural areas have a clean environment. Some of the most environmentally damaged urban areas have a thriving economic sector.

 

Even when we identify correctly the area of the organisation needing attention, we are often slightly off target with the intervention. For example, economic development tends to be employment-obsessed. However, globally over half of those living in disadvantaged areas - are not able to take up any paid employment. They are either over retirement age, under 16, suffering from long-term illness or disability, or caring for others. For this majority, the area’s economic problems are not to do with lack of jobs but more to do with poor public and private services, high credit costs, a lack of disposable income after basic necessities are paid for, and a lack of savings to fall back on. A poor area also lacks the ability to retain what wealth and money circulation it has. If we are setting meaningful economic targets, we could look at the number of assets in the area that are owned locally, either by individuals or collectively, since one key characteristic of a very economically poor area is that there is little local ownership. We could also look at the number of times money circulates within the local economy: again this is a key way of sorting out the affluent from the poor. We could set up programmes to foster the social economy, including credit unions, food buying co-operatives, community businesses and marginal employment opportunities.

 

In terms of environmental intervention, we have inherited an over-emphasis on the ‘green’ side of environmentalism, rather than, say, the economic. We look at the amount of waste that is produced, and what percentage of this is recycled. We seek standards for the amount of green space per household. Until recently we have paid relatively little attention to issues of production and distribution. For example, we could look at what percentage of food consumed is produced locally and how much of it is produced using organic methods.

 

Our understanding to social sustainability is at an equally rudimentary stage. It doesn’t take into account the general health of the autonomous community sector – this includes groups with no paid staff which are free of bureaucratic control in a way that the traditional voluntary sector now finds it hard to be. If we looked at the social organisation of an area, we could count how many community groups there are per household, the percentage of residents active in them and so on, and then go on to improve the community structures and local business.

 

So, how would we recognise a sustainable organisation? What is urgently needed is not endless theoretical speculation but agreement among sustainability professionals on a ‘classic package’ to assess how to develop a sustainable organisation, with standardised areas of concern, agreed terminology and accepted levels of achievement. We simply don’t have this at the moment, and every sustainability project or partnership I have witnessed or heard about has constructed a sustainability framework version of its own by default, making comparison difficult and perpetuating the reinvention of the wheel, over and over again.

 

“Sustainability Change Agents” must enter the scene at the point where hard choices have to be made over resource allocations. The creation of accepted key indicators is just the beginning of the process, and a standardised way of assessing gaps and needs does not tell us how to prioritise which we remedy first.

 

The kind of classic package described above would not of course tell us what is of more or lesser value to the organisation itself. But what it would do is allow a basis for dialogue between the professional ‘change agent’ and employees. It sets a framework that allows employees to adapt or reject what is on offer. They can set their own priorities – to choose whether they prefer a real and genuine future that is sustainable for their own future.

 

Managers and employees can’t construct their own development plan out of nothing, with no tools of analysis or description. Some of the feel-good sustainability rhetoric seems to imply that we should leave it entirely to the same people (leaders) to state its own needs. But to ask this is to impose an unfair burden – approaching employees with a template and suggestions is not the same as imposing a plan. This process of dialogue allows managers and employees to set their own priorities, to choose whether they prefer to follow a more sustainability journey or not.

 

I cannot emphasis the need for more discussion on Sustainable Indicators, they are needed badly as we struggle to create a new sustainability future – sustainable organisations and future regeneration - and a new way of working to go with it. We should not be ashamed at this stage in history that many indicators are prescriptive or oversimplified. Nor should we be ashamed, as the Western World so often are, of the idealism that lies behind our attempts.

 

Beneath this struggle for a standardised but flexible framework to assess organisational needs lies a profound commitment to work with managers and employees who want to their best for the great good.