Developing A Roadmap for Transformation: Individual Level – Frank Brueck
Corporate Sustainability. Understanding and Seizing the Strategic Opportunity
The achievement of a balanced economic, social and environmental development - as expressed in the UN Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development - is recognized as one of the major challenges humanity is facing today. What is less clear is whether and how organizations can generate business opportunities and value for their stakeholders while tackling such challenges. In this course, thought leaders in a wide variety of management and economics fields illustrate how to assess and seize the opportunities offered by these global emergencies. They will offer new ways to understand the purpose and the logic of success of the business enterprise in this new context, providing ideas and examples on how to manage the transition process to realize the value creation potential from corporate sustainability for all involved stakeholders. Learning objectives The course will allow you to: - Understand What the macroeconomic and microeconomic consequences of both climate changes, poverty, hunger, gender or race discriminations, lack of communication between the State, Civil Societies, and businesses, etc are. - Understand Why it is important for businesses to tackle sustainability issues in order to create more and better business opportunities; - Learn How each individual, organization and system can start to analyze its behaviors and change towards more sustainable practices and models.
Transitioning Organizations to Sustainable Enterprises: Developing the Road-Map
In this final part, you will learn how to approach the challenge of developing a roadmap to realize the stakeholder value creation potential in sustainability transitions at three different levels. It will entail the integration of change initiatives in the development of sustainability mindsets and behavior in managers and employees - individual level - with initiatives related to transformational change in the organizations we are working in - organizational level -, and the equally critical initiatives to transition towards sustainable behaviors and outcomes in the political, social and economic systems - systemic level -.
behavior in an organization, towards individual
and organizational flourishing. As we mentioned before, it is a collective effort that is needed. So the organization
needs to contribute to that. Organizational processes are important, like policies, codes of contact, behavioral
rules, and so forth. There are externals which are important like
government rules and so forth.
But the nucleus of all this development is the individual. If the individual does not come along,
we will not get a flourishing organization,
and that's the challenge. Now, how can the individual change? You know, the individual is influenced, of course,
by the family situation, by religion, by personal standards, personal values and so forth.
Now, how do we get a socially responsible manager, somebody who acts ethically, somebody who is what the
company wants to be? There was a study in Austria
in 1990- sorry, in 2003,
and this study was very interesting because the outcome was only if the manager’s moral beliefs
are set up in the right way, real change towards sustainability will happen. All the other influencing factors
were far beyond that, they were not as important. Seventy five percent of the people thought this was the way to go.
Now, you may have seen this cartoon. It’s the simple question who wants change? Everyone is for it,
but when you ask who wants to change, no hands go up, right? So, how do we get people to feel that they want to change,
that they want to embrace change,
and where do they change towards, right? Well, what's the goal? Now, socially responsible behavior is something that was defined
as a pattern of decisions and actions taken by individuals with the primary purpose of social
and environmental wellbeing. That's good,
but the definition of what that means in detail is still very difficult, right, because how do you define ethical behavior, for instance.
The utilitarian view of ethics would be you want to have the greatest good for everyone.
Or, individualists would say, I want to have the greatest good for myself, or moral rights should be more important
and need to be protected.
Or it has to be a trust way to deal with people. All these different ways of seeing socially responsible behavior
will lead to different results.
Now there are even checklists on how to behave ethically.
That's basically a good idea, because, for
instance, one of these checklists, such as step one, recognize your ethical dilemmas.
That's quite important,
because often you don't even know that you have a dilemma there.
Get the facts is step two.
Identify your options, figure out what you can do, test each option.
Is this legal, is it right, is it beneficial?
All these things are quite important.
The next step, decide which option to follow and
then you want to test it again and think of it, if you tell your parents or
your wife about it, would they be happy with your decision?
Or if you would read it in the newspaper tomorrow morning,
would you be happy with what you read, right?
So they are quite good tests, and
you want to take action only after you have followed this checklist.
Now these checklists are well and good, but
there is a problem with rationalizations, right?
Because they can work in both ways.
We can convince ourselves that something is terribly ethical, or that it is the opposite. If we are not sure,
then we may try to say things like, well, you know, it's not really illegal to do that, right, or it's in everyone's best interest.
Or maybe we would say, oh, nobody's gonna find out, anyway, or the organization will protect me.
And different standards apply here at this place anyway, so that would be the cultural relativism, right,
where a company does something very different in a different country
and which a behavior that doesn't follow the ethical standards in the home country. Now, this is one problem
with the rational way to go towards.
The other problem is that what we know from emotional intelligence, emotions are faster, right,
so emotions are always there first
and then emotional action will be there always first. So even if we try to rationalize things,
it will already be tainted by our emotional disposition,
and if this one is not right, the rational processes will also not work well. So now the big question is can we actually
produce socially responsible managers? Do they have to be socially responsible to begin with,
or can they be trained? Is there a way to generate socially responsible managers? Well, there was a new project
held between 2003 and 2007.
At that point, this project response was the biggest project in sustainability in terms of management studies.
And it had a quite good take-up companies like IBM, J&J,
Microsoft, Shell, or Unilever participated in it.
The idea there was amongst others, to find out how can we train managers to become socially responsible?
So, different ways were used. One way was to give them the classical inputs by high-level lecturers,
workshops with these people, but the other way was, try a completely different approach, try something like relaxation
or try an approach like meditation. Of course, there was also a control group,
and the outcome of this project is very interesting because it showed us that there are very
surprising results and surprising ways
how we can work on socially responsible behavior. For instance, we found that the classical
standard approach to teach people CSR was not effective. That was a surprise,
but in the end, it even showed sometimes negative results. The other surprising result was that the non-cognitive
interventions were quite successful. So we had a very positive effect in this. Key internal change operations
and cultural change cannot be rationally achieved, or not only rationally achieved.
And, well, the sad news was also that the current approaches didn't work. Now, the conclusion basically of all this was
that the transformation has to happen on a different level. Meditation can help,
and meditation can lead us into a new dimension where we actually work on the deep rooted values
and basic assumptions of people.
And that's exactly where we need to go. What are the impacts of meditation on ethical decisions,
on decisions, dilemmas? And it was quite amazing because
when people are confronted with scenarios, we found that after meditation, they significantly decreased the idea that
the company results are the most important thing
and nothing else counts, whereas compassionate and caring attitudes are much more important. That's news,
and particularly the environment became more important, although environment was not even mentioned once
in the meditation process. So, it works on a level that we haven't realized before,
and that's why we can go deep. The prioritization of decision criteria is also important.
The social wellbeing, economic and environmental wellbeing
became much more important. Now, even emotional traits changed. That's very surprising because
the program was basically six weeks long. After six weeks’ meditation, the confidence of people, in terms of
they are more fearless, they have a decreased anger, happiness prevails. Remember, we want individual flourishing,
so that's very important, or decreased feeling of nervousness were much higher. But also the personal values changed,
and that's even more surprising. So, we found that people had a much more forgiving attitude. They felt much more
responsible for what was going on around, they had a decreased need to shine themselves, like the personal importance
was less, and they saw a world of beauty out there
and they felt in unity with nature. Now, these are the people we want to see in organizations, right?
Now, how do we introduce meditative processes into the organizational change process?
The one big thing is that we need to start with the diagnosis first, right, see what the organization looks like,
how it is dispositioned. But we'll start with meditators in one department,
and on a voluntary basis people can see, does it reduce stress, does it help to create these values we want to see?
If it works, we can expand it, have different people from
different departments join in.
And once this is established as a pattern, the people, for instance, meditate in their lunch breaks, we can also introduce
meditation into business processes, like when we have a very heated meeting, we can choose meditation to cool us down.
And like this, meditative processes, reflective processes,
will help the people in the organization to balance themselves, and with that,
almost automatically also the organization will balance itself. We need this double development where
we have the structural changes, the organizational changes
and the individual changes. Once both are integrated, we'll reach a completely new level
and this new level will be the flourishing organization.