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

The project will push the boundaries of management research by examining how future and current goals can be aligned. It aims to answer three objectives: (1) How can a company’s management team know the extent to which their current environmental solutions are inter-connected with other objectives? (2) How can a company develop a systemic, interdependent set of future solutions and changes to incorporate sustainability alongside their other goals? (3) How can a company plan to transition from their current approach to this better scenario?

We will analyse company mission statements/strategic objective documents and conduct interviews with senior managers to produce their Organisational Goal Hierarchy (OGH). We will also run scenario planning workshops, to investigate future scenarios of different types, and levels of, environmental embeddedness and determine the feasibility and consequences of each scenario. We will develop the future OGH scenarios to depict various options for transformations towards net-zero based on developing our previous research. Upon completion, participating companies will have chosen a net-zero strategy which works synergistically with their other objectives, and will have planned their upcoming transition.

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

University of Leeds