The Journey to Sustainable Effectiveness: An Examination of the Design and Implementation Issues

The journey to sustainable effectiveness is complex and challenging. On the one hand, it implies an integrated set of complex design features that allows the organization to pursue and achieve three interdependent outcomes: economic, social, and environmental. There is a dearth of frameworks and examples demonstrating 1) how these goals should be established and whether their integrated achievement is possible or must be traded off and 2) what structures, incentives, decision rights, or coordination processes must be designed to support the achievement of these goals. On the other hand, sustainable effectiveness also implies that organizations should be agile enough to remain effective over time. It’s not enough to achieve these objectives once; sustainable effectiveness requires repeated achievement. The challenge of transforming to more agile forms and the challenges associated with operating these types of organization is not well understood. This symposium will focus on the longitudinal and meta-learnings from a dynamic and international network of scholars who have partnered with executives and practitioners over the past five years to develop deep case studies with organizations committed to developing sustainable effectiveness.