Most change efforts fail. This is a well-documented warning to all who embark on the path of organizational change. Often what’s missing is support for an organizational culture that will anchor the change and make it a part of the new normal. A transformative change such as the transition to a sustainability-driven organization requires intentionally developing a culture that supports this new vision.
A new study (Embedding Sustainability in Organizational Culture), sponsored by the Network for Business Sustainability, asks the question “what organizational practices build and support a culture of sustainability?” In this comprehensive review of practitioner and academic literature, researchers assessed 179 sources and identified 59 distinct practices, guided by the questions “what are they doing?”, “who is doing it?”, “what are they trying to accomplish?” and “how are they going about it?”. The result is a thorough collection of practices organizations can take to implement culture change to support a new ethos. Rather than a prescriptive “how to model”, the study encompasses a portfolio approach, identifying and categorizing organizational culture change practices.
The model emerging from this literature review is a useful handle for considering different approaches to culture change and ensuring that goal matches practice. The model spans practices across four quadrants: Practices that foster commitment incorporate informal approaches to shaping organizational values and fulfill on current sustainability initiatives. Practices that clarify expectations build on fulfilling current sustainability initiatives with formal practices that establish rules and procedures. Practices that install capacity for change go beyond rules and procedures to encourage innovation, moving the organization towards sustainability. Practices that build momentum for change engage innovation and tap into informal approaches to affecting values and behaviours. This is not a prescriptive process but a reinforcing wheel of possible activities to consider in engaging the whole organization towards deepening its commitment to sustainability.
A weak link in this study, I feel, is the definition used to describe a culture of sustainability. If we are looking at how to get there and how other organizations are going about it, it would be important to include in our catchment, those organizations that fulfill our goal. The definition used in the study is: “a culture of sustainability is one in which organizational members hold shared assumptions and beliefs about the importance of balancing economic efficiency and social equity and environmental accountability”. This seems a little vague and hard to measure. By the study’s own model, that is only a quarter of the picture. Using the model, a culture of sustainability should be one that holds shared values, adopts clear policies, fulfills on existing commitments and is actively adopting innovative new processes to balance economic efficiency, social equity and environmental accountability.
Another consideration: How is change for sustainability different from any other change – or is it? As change towards sustainability is relatively new, and therefore sparsely documented, the study draws from literature assessing other types of organization-wide ethos change (safety and ethics). However, the study describes two ways in which a sustainability culture change is different from other types of organizational culture change. First, this change must be society-wide. Drivers for sustainability can be external to the organization and therefore may not be seen, at least initially, as having inherent value to the organization. Second, achieving sustainability may involve paradigm-breaking business models and navigation into unchartered territory.
Personally, I think we are only at the very beginning of the journey. And that journey will involve a paradigm change that right now is difficult to imagine, given that we live and think within a non-sustainable paradigm right now. We can only start with where we are now, of course, but we should keep in mind as we travel this journey, that we are beating the path while we walk it.
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