Designing sustainability programs to avoid and escape the capability trap (original) (raw)
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Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity
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Overcoming Decision Traps in Sustainable Design
2003
The call for sustainability has created opportunities for taking a more holistic view of design. However, it also poses challenges for designers who must often resort to heuristic decision rules in order to deal with its complexities. The problem is that these heuristics can lead to suboptimal designs. The decision traps encountered in sustainable design are identified as focus on end-ofpipe treatment, pollution transfer, objective isolation and status quo anchoring. An illustrative case study of a new technology to recover solvent emissions from manufacturing operations is presented. A normative decision tool in the form of multiattribute utility is used as a design evaluation methodology. Four different objectives of capital cost, operating cost, liquid recovery and environmental impact are integrated in the evaluation function. The resulting designs involving decision traps are seen to be of lower overall utility as compared to the design methodology that addresses these traps.
2013
This dissertation uses a multiple case study format with polar sampling to examine the organizational strategies and processes underlying two firms’ successful sustainability programs, in order to understand the factors leading to positive sustainability outcomes. Particular attention is given to the values underlying sustainable development objectives, the means of institutionalizing those values, and the organizational strategies and resources utilized to protect those values while simultaneously serving other important organizational values. The two organizations studied have different business structures and decision-making processes; however, they share three key features that empower strong sustainability outcomes. First, each organization has an embedded sustainability criterion that ensures the organization acts on sustainability concerns across its value chain. Second, each has learning processes by which it dismantles barriers to sustainability. Third, each organizatio...
Sustainability and Value through Improved Decision-making
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The 30th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, 2012
The impacts on energy generation and use on sustainability, increasing energy demand, and declining natural resources have made energy improvements a top priority for many organizations. But adequate financing for sustainability improvement projects for built infrastructures is not available. The Paid-From-Savings approach can leverage savings to pay for energy improvements. Although well established and adopted by many organizations, an incomplete understanding of the dynamics of these revolving fund programs hinders their effective and efficient use. In the current work the Harvard Green Campus Initiative and a Texas A&M University sustainability improvement programs were used to develop a dynamic model of a revolving sustainability fund. The validated model is used to test the effectiveness of three project planning strategies and two financing alternatives. Results indicate that with adequate funding it was most advantageous to proceed with all projects as quickly as possible and that with insufficient initial funding the best strategy depended upon the program objectives (e.g. earliest completion, largest fund, minimum negative fund balance). Contributions to sustainability and system dynamics modeling and future research opportunities are discussed.
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Mechanisms to measure and reward performance contributing to environmental and social responsibility goals vary across organizations. This paper formulates a framework, based upon cost variance analysis, to study and analyze these differences. The framework decomposes sustainability objectives into two parts. The first consists of what might be considered a natural outcome of pursuing the traditional economic goal of efficiency through cost-minimization (a “waste” variance). The second part consists of sustainability gains that produce societal benefit but may be incongruent with short-term economic goals (a “sustainability” variance). While elimination of waste variances can be encouraged using a traditional performance evaluation and reward structure, elimination of sustainability variances requires re-design of performance evaluation tools and reward structures. We further demonstrate that differing production functions across organizations and industries impact the relative magnitude of the two variances. The failure to recognize and incorporate these differences can lead to inefficient allocation of resources and/or only partial fulfillment of strategic environmental goals of the organization.