Most sustainability programs concentrate exclusively on technological solutions while overlooking the huge and largely untapped potential of a better-functioning human ecology. The substantial ROI for creating more energy-efficient buildings naturally points to other ways of “greening” the bottom line, including improving indoor air quality, reducing water use, recapturing waste, minimizing travel, and preventing pollution. We all benefit from these efforts!

Now imagine the rewards, financial and otherwise, of recapturing the losses of human energy, passion, drive, commitment, and potential that result from outdated organizational structures, misfocused leadership, poor planning, inept communications, fierce territoriality, misdirected attention, dysfunctional teams, unshared knowledge, endless and unproductive meetings, and the myriad other challenges to creative, productive, and satisfying worklives.
Improving the human ecology in organizational life fosters sustainability and improves the bottom line at least as much as technological approaches, if not substantially more.

In nearly 30 years as a management and communications consultant, I’ve observed many of the same unhelpful patterns in most organizations, regardless of industry, sector, size, or developmental stage, to wit:

  • over-use of a small subset of resources/capacities while many valuable resources/capacities are under-utilized, if not entirely overlooked;
  • symptomatic rather than systemic focus, leading to symptom-abatement and problem-solving rather than pattern-recognition and issue-identification;
  • unproductive teams and meetings due to unclear planning, focus, communications, agendas, roles, and outcomes;
  • orientation towards blame rather than towards learning;
  • disconnect between the big picture/strategy/leadership and day-to-day reality/tactics/workers, often leading to customers (internal & external) feeling like adversaries rather than allies;
  • greater emphasis on the ‘what’ than the ‘how’;
  • urgency for answers without regard for the quality of the questions!

Creating work spaces that respect our shared environment without also reshaping the work patterns that constrain human/organizational potential is like installing “green” components on an industrial drive-train; the wheels are still going to come off!

Of course it’s easier to change the light bulbs than our brains — I’ll dive into that in another post soon — but since the potential of making even small shifts towards “working wise” is so phenomenal, let’s add human/organizational potential to our sustainabilty equation of:

  • Reuse (no good ideas or goodwill left behind)
  • Reduce (overuse of a narrow spectrum of human/organizational capacity)
  • Recycle (compost our “failures” to nourish new growth)
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