Some Sustainable Organization Basics

Sustainable Organizations Result from a Suficiency of Four Vectors.

Context - this includes all the context setting issues such as "real boss", "time horizon for longest task", "role within the team or work unit", and other context setting information to enable the worker to "choose to be a member of the company" - trust
Competency - this includes "CIP", "Mode", Preferences and Interests", "KSA's", "Work-life Values", to enable the worker to “do what I do best”. - capacity
Vested Engagement - this includes the "job contract", "felt fair pay", "requisite configuration of roles", to enable the worker to “be accountable for performance”. –commitment or covenant
Adaptive Alignment – this includes disclosure and information exchange and feedback from research, from goal and target setting, from competitors and so forth. It is based on knowledge management or research practice engaged in by the organization. – consequence or feedback

A Precondition for Sustainable Business Is A Sufficiently Sound Business Contract With Employees and Customers

A contract has the following features: (Notice the correlation between the items in the contract and the vectors of the business.)

Mutual Consent
Lawful Object
Consideration or Exchange
Competent Actors

Sustainable Businesses Features and Activities Result

Trust is developed when sufficient context is provided. When sufficient context is provided the participant understands the roles and reasons. Full disclosure of context yields the possibility of making a commitment to the organization.

Commitment is developed when mutual consent results from both understanding of the context and confidence the parties involved will be able (competent) to deliver on their agreement.

Action or Performance follows when the interests of all parties to the agreement converge sufficiently and can sustain public scrutiny and disclosure. (lawful object and fair exchange)

Feedback enables sustainable performance through disclosure of measurable and meaningful timetables and deliverables or information on conditions that might lead to changes based on actual circumstances in the environment. This is feedback and information (knowledge management) that leads to changes in organizational or individual responses due to disaster or other forces outside the control of either or both parties.

Sustainable Businesses Have Four Intersecting and Continuous Systems or Processes

Operations and/or Internal Systems (These facilitate Ownership and Trust)
Marketing and/or Sales (These facilitate through their success in the marketplace Feedback and Knowledge Management)
Management and/or Direction (These facilitate monitoring of Commitments and Context setting.)
Production (These facilitate Performance and Competency actualization)

Individual Sustainability

If these “pivots” hold for a sustainable organization, do they also hold for an individual?

Here is a first offering of how one might think about this.

Competency – I have the skills and ability to do what I need to do to survive and thrive. These would include IQ, EQ, KSA’s, Physical, and other capacities.

Vested Engagement – I am commited to fill the roles, contracts, and agreements I have entered into.

Context – I have a framework of values and understandings (mental models) that shape how I sort through stimuli and aim for larger themeses and values.

Adaptive Alignment – I utilize feedback on my competencies, commitments, and my context sufficient to enable to me to adapt my responses to suit emerging physical or social conditions. Whether I engage in first order or second order adaptation, I always re-align myself to be congruent with my primary context, competencies and commitments.

Research Contributions

Please research questions, cases, anecdotes, and data in this area.

The first agenda item for research into Sustainable Organization (or any endeavor with a basis in “knowledge or science”) is to find parallels between it and other approaches being used in a domain under consideration. This is the literature review that In the hard sciences is nicely constrained and contained by the history of experiments. In social sciences or disciplines a lot of sorting has to occur to get at what the hard sciences come by easily.

You will want to look at your "literature" to determine whether there is a coherent model or appoach – as opposed to a list of “considerations” – being offered to the reader in order to:

Structure the organization of the domain in a macro sense and to the topic at hand. This will require sorting and organizing the content into clear statements that define the Context. If you were a research scientist, you would state these as the set of hypothesis the writer of the text has offered about the subject.

Parse the original texts and reorganize their contents into levels or layers. This is the Cascading part of the Context. Think of this as a series of concentric circles, each circle containing its own necessary and sufficient subset of context. If you were a research scientist, this would be the subset of hypotheses you would test and experiments you would run …… moving from the small world of petrie dish … to animal research… to the ecosystem itself.

Relate business processes (Policies, Program Structure, Staffing, Content, Quality Indicators….) in a clear and logical and fashion to the context to define the skills, competencies, and domain knowledge required at each level of the cascaded context. Here, you are beginning to build the Requisite Competencies that can be derived from the texts you are offered. If you were a research scientist, this would be the constrained list of chemicals and materials you would use for your experiments.

As you do this analysis of the materials you are reading, you will be enriching the original models
· by identifying gaps or weaknesses inherent their internal logic
· exposing their steps or activities (experimental designs) for an “ideal” result or outcome in an organized fashion.

You will also be organizing your material into two of the premises of Sustainable Organization to later fold in Vested Engagement and Adaptive Alignment.