Completed: Co-designing a goal interdependency method for deciding corporate sustainability strategy

In collaboration with The Dean Group and Morgan Advanced Materials

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to Corporate Environmental Sustainability (CES) because organisations have different organisational goals (aims, values, projects, strategies, initiatives & activities) and different interdependencies across these goals. Nevertheless, there is currently no tool or process companies can follow to decide upon their unique and optimal CES particularly when transformational change is required. To address this lack of knowledge and practical need, we used a connectionist approach (akin to neural networks) and developed a multi-step process. Together with one larger (global) and one small (UK-based) organisation from the Foundation Industries, we demonstrated the usefulness of an ‘Organisational Goal Hierarchy’ (OGH) map in both prompting areas for new ideas and evaluating those ideas. This OGH tool can now be used by others to aid decision-making around contextualised improvements for CES.

The primary output of this project is a ‘how to’ process/tool kit, incorporating various guises of an OGH tool, which managers can use to make optimal decisions around exactly how they can best improve their CES, and action plan their implementation.

Dr. Rebecca Pieniazek r.pieniazek@leeds.ac.uk

University of Leeds