Sustain · 24 / 24
Making legitimacy durable
Sustainability Thinking is the discipline of reading economic, social, environmental, and ethical consequence together rather than one at a time, so an organization's success does not quietly deplete the trust, people, or conditions that make its continued existence legitimate.
The trade-off between present commercial performance and the long-term legitimacy that permission to keep operating depends on.
Organizations are often built to optimize inside silos and justify consequences across them later, which lets costs get pushed into another stakeholder, another system, or another point in time until they return as a crisis that appears to come from nowhere. It never truly comes from nowhere.
In practice, this requires asking what value is being created and for whom, what costs are being quietly displaced, and what would still make a decision defensible several years from now rather than only profitable next quarter. It has to change what gets funded, not only what gets said.
This competency has its own chapter in the second edition.
Second Edition — available now
Twenty-four competencies, read through the DOES cycle and the Levels of Work. The full architecture, chapter by chapter.
Available in paperback and Kindle.