Keywords

1 Introduction

Sustainability thinking in enterprise strategies has emerged as a new concern for leaders in many industries. It has spread like a virus in corporate visions communications, which tend to be abstract (see Chapter 2). Despite increasing attention on countries and companies’ sustainability goals, we know less about leadership for sustainability as continuous practices in micro, at the layers of more concrete developmental activities. On this background, we propose that more attention could beneficially be devoted to how change management and design practices can leverage sustainable design in the enterprise’s innovation-oriented workings.

For this aim, we combine processual philosophy and sustainability-oriented design thinking with exemplary practices in one specialized business enterprise in the office furniture industry, to help us understand how and why micro sustainability practices can be born, formed, and shaped and how they can evolve into something foundational for an entire value creation.

The focussed case in this chapter, Flokk, has pioneered sustainability thinking in both its design and development work, as well as its entire philosophizing towards the users (Jevnaker, 2012). In contrast to prevailing management beliefs towards unconstrained creativity, enduring imaginative design and development efforts and leading with some concrete constraining criteria can become beneficial for leveraging sustainable practices, as shown in this puzzling office chairmaker case.

This conceptual and empirically grounded chapter seeks to understand sustainability thinking in micro-practices, which we understand as part of the nitty–gritty of everyday work. In line with Ciborra (2009), we argue the need to move from abstract thinking to explore more concrete “tinkering” with complex information and design. In short, the daily creative workings can open for ways to reuse and reduce resources, transform offerings and core systems, and thus enabling (or hindering) sustainability innovations. The combination of understanding the change and design processes as parallel or entangled processes for sustainability makes the chapter unique.

However, to follow the pioneering examples of the office furniture-maker, Flokk, and their communities of practices who have worked with sustainable design for over 40 years, we need to attend to multifaceted practices over time. The current CEO emphasized both the people and the culture, and the design guide criteria used in “tough” ways to assemble their long-lasting products (Flokk’s Sustainability report, 2021). Flokk's strong position on sustainable design goes back to the early nineties, or before that (Jevnaker, 1991, 1995). It is founded on development practices including solid quality control to ensure that no harmful substances are used, and that the furniture still achieves the adequate strength required.

Our research problem is (1) to shed light on how and why such micro sustainability practices can be born, formed, and shaped? Furthermore, (2) what the roles for leadership are in how sustainability design may evolve into something foundational for an enterprise’s purpose and value creation? Finally, (3) how do creative design and change processes contribute to understanding sustainability?

For this explorative conceptual aim, we combine processual philosophy and sustainability-oriented design thinking with exemplary practices in one specialized business enterprise to help us understand beyond the abstract sustainability goals layer. Specifically, we explore and discuss how design practices in relation to this enterprise could take steps towards beginning and eventually leading ecological sustainability development in office chair-making. This concerned discussions on both “what might be” (Simon, 1969/1996) and “what might NOT be” (Jevnaker, 2012), as well as what could make sitting a joyful and meaningful experience in a dynamic sitting perspective (see Jevnaker, 1991, 2012; Opsvik, 2008). The latter is highly relevant since many participate in a daily sitting marathon throughout their work and commuting hours and at home.

Ecological thinking, in general, refers to living creatures' dwelling (see Chapter 1), which we contend includes the office work habitats and the “seated man”. Concurrently, tonnes of waste in office furniture harm the environment, which calls for organized changes and responsible leadership action. It is thus noteworthy how leadership for sustainability involved constraining aspects to avoid “the bad, wrong and ugly” commonly present in industrial long-linked technologies, such as in furnishing industries.

2 Perspectives on Organizational Change

How, then, to address sustainable organization changes in industries like furnishing? A common and essential categorization in organizational change-oriented research is the distinction between change as episodic, discontinuous, and intermittent at one side, and change as continuous, evolving, and incremental (Weick & Quinn, 1999). The first stream of contributions assumes that stability is the standard and desired situation for most organizations. Change efforts must be managed by extraordinary activities commonly represented as linear projects consisting of planned actions. Examples are the practical guidelines offered by Kanter et al. (1992), Kotter (1996), and Luecke (2003). Within the second stream, organizational life is assumed to consist of micro-changes that can aggregate into more macro and fundamental organizational changes over time. This category is often called organizational development (OD). It has the common presumption that change is emergent, meaning it is “the realization of a new pattern of organizing in the absence of explicit a priori intentions” (Orlikowski, 1996, p. 65; Weick & Quinn, 1999, p. 375).

These two categories have also been combined in the same model. Portraying organizational growth as alternating stages of change and development, Greiner (1972) called such a trajectory “evolutions and revolutions as organizations grow”. This sequential phasing of different change forms was later labelled the punctuated equilibrium paradigm (Gersick, 1991) or the punctuated equilibrium model (Miller & Friesen, 1980; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985). Duncan (1976) used contingency theory to provide a prescriptive model for two basic organizational processes innovation and implementation which requires different organizational design (p. 185). His contribution lies in the articulation of when and how to switch between the two processes. Duncan's argumentation is based on the premise that an organization just can handle one process at a time. More recently, we have seen contributions emphasizing that different change efforts and processes can coexist and take place in parallel (Langley & Denis, 2006; Meyer & Stensaker, 2006; Stensaker et al., 2002). Our research model is based on how these two processes coexist in an extended understanding of design, change, and sustainability (Jevnaker & Olaisen, 2021).

Almost everyone who writes about change bases their argumentation on a paradigmatic assumption that change adds to the complexity of an organization, which is the same as assuming that stability and equilibrium are the typical attributes of organizational life. We turn this dominant assumption around and work on the premise that both episodic and continuous organizational change is a standard and wanted situation in most firms. Such changes occur primarily as persistent dynamic processes (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002), and successive projects are present simultaneously either as separate actions, parallel, or intertwined processes. The dynamic processes contrast the punctuated equilibrium model, assuming that organizations experience relatively long periods of stability or equilibrium, punctuated by condense periods of revolutionary change (Gersick, 1991; Miller & Frisen, 1980; Romanelli & Tushman, 1994; Tushman & Romanelli, 1985). Stability is not a wanted situation but rather parallel or intertwined continuous change processes, design, and sustainability improvements. Nevertheless, they may be difficult to leverage and realize in beneficial ways, and stabilizing aims, and accomplishments are essential, too.

Viewing organizations as fundamental change-creating entities or processes challenges many of our taken for granted interpretations and raise many essential questions (see e.g., Langley & Tsoukas, 2017). We think it is of utter importance to clarify the mechanisms that energize such organizations because these could significantly contribute to understanding why and how sustainability change activities and design processes occur.

3 Perspectives on Sustainability: Thinking and Tinkering

Zooming in on leadership for sustainable design in real-world enterprises, we may distinguish between similarities and differences in perspectives, aspirations, practices, and premises. Indeed, numerous companies seem to follow some global trends in management, and leadership ideas may spread almost like a virus (Jevnaker & Olaisen, 2022; see Chapter 2). Our purpose here is not a literature review. Instead, we seek to orient this chapter towards fruitful action-based views on leadership for sustainable design.

Inspired by Ciborra (2009), we distinguish between thinking and tinkering when enterprises engage in design (see Table 6.1). Extending this perspective to leadership with and for sustainability design, we draw on our past research on complex design processes between enterprises and creative design specialists (see e.g., Jevnaker, 2000, 2012).

Table 6.1 Perspectives on leadership for sustainability action
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McDonough and Braungart (2002) distinguish between eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness. Eco-efficiency is a term that emerged from the business actors engaged in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Primarily, it means “doing more with less”, including “being less bad”, argue McDonough and Braungart (2002, pp. 51, 67). They point out that in a philosophical sense, “efficiency has no independent value; it depends on the value of the larger system of which it is a part” (p. 65). As a part, it may be beneficial, but “it is not a strategy for success over the long-term”.

Being less harmful “is to accept things as they are” contend McDonough and Braungart (2002). On the other hand, Eco-effectiveness is about “doing the right things”, as Peter Drucker (a critical leadership thinker) suggested. Most interesting is that these authors stress that we humans can do better than “to be less bad”. What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100% good, they ask?

3.1 Sustainability as Action-Based Practices

Ciborra (2009) distinguished between thinking and tinkering. He observed that enterprises tended to drift and fail in their planned ICT projects. Inspired by this information and knowledge management literature, we argue that merely abstract thinking for the People, Planet, and Profit (see Chapter 1) is not enough for leveraging and accomplishing sustainable design. Interestingly, Ciborra noticed that successful companies tended to spend a lot of their time trying out or tinkering.

As explained by Ciborra (2009), tinkering or bricolage can be the constant re-ordering of people and resources, the constant “trying out” in permanent dynamics of change.

3.2 The Roles of Leadership in Sustainable Design

Sustainable designing can be regarded as a kind of paradoxical collaborative action (Jevnaker, 2014). Firstly, working closely with independent-minded designers in strategically essential areas both in-house and out-of-house across several customers, suppliers, and knowledge networks may seem paradoxical to everyday thinking. Secondly, experimenting with uncommon, somewhat wild ideas may seem even more so.

However, as we shall explore, experiences from corporate innovations in office furniture-making suggest that it can be gratifying to adopt and foster uncommon design ideas and work persistently to make leaps in different and sustainable ways.

3.3 Reflections on Organization Changes

Classifying theories of change, Van de Ven and Poole (1995) use the expression motor as a valuable metaphor for investigating organizational changes, “we will call them motors—to explain how and why changes unfold” (p. 511). They ended up with four organizational development and change theories—evolution, dialectic, life cycle, and teleology. These categories rely on ideal motors of change which can be recognized as a distinct action style (p. 524). A metaphor allows us to stretch our thinking and deepen our understanding, allowing us to see things in new ways and act in new ways (Morgan, 1980, 1986). The motor metaphor may be good because it is associated with energy that propels organizational changes, but the type of changes they refer to lies mainly within the traditional paradigm of change as development or extraordinary activities for filling gaps.

Our focal firm Flokk tries to drive changes in the industry due to the often-changing business conditions that others must accept. In a situation like this, we think it is appropriate to swap the mechanical machine associations from the motor metaphor with some more dynamic and opens possibilities for multi-tasking; working with several practices in some combinations. We suggest using the metaphors energy and processor for catching the kind of changes we have discussed. The metaphor of energy pays attention to what fuels or energizes the organization to bring about proactive changes (or possibly resistance). Whereas the metaphor of a processor—a central processing unit (CPU), or better: processing that is not only allowing for but encompassing distributed programming, leadership, expertise, and engagements from manyplaces—contains options for a variety of ways of performing or enabling changes. This can help us understand processing and practices with other entities, for example, through parallel, simultaneous, or combined processing of activities, which we will come back to and reflect upon.

Nevertheless, before that, we dwell on the role of the mediating technology. March (1991) distinguished exploration and exploitation as two adaptive processes in organizations. The winning design is explored and understood to be able to exploit them in the production process. According to March, exploring and exploiting simultaneously is necessary to be competitive, requiring an everchanging competence—knowledge, experiences, and attitudes working together from what we know to what we do not know that we know as an imaginary mental process.

4 Puzzling Example: A Strategic Design Innovation-Oriented Case

In the following, we draw on one company case and its brand, HÅG, a former separate company that today is a crucial part of the more significant concern, Flokk Ltd. Within the furniture industry, Flokk is a leader when it comes to sustainability, with decades-long, puzzling history of sustainable innovation dating back for example to 1990 when HÅG was the first company in Norway to hire a full-time sustainability officer. Even before, designing sustainable or long-life products was attended to in HÅG’s designer collaborations (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012). What is puzzling then is the transformative evolution of this local chairmaker and its working relations in the product design development, communication, distribution, and customer and end-user contacts. Organizing design has evolved from a limited competence situation without any professional designer assistance towards a knowledge creating and dynamic sustainability design approach. Drawing on several decades of innovation-rich development history, this sustainability design evolution with Flokk is of interest to other companies, managers, and specialists.

The case material we draw on in the following is collected in research by one of us (Jevnaker) and is also assembled from the company's current open sources (own webpage, videos, annual reports). The case research encompasses several rounds of extended interviews, multiple company visits, numerous conversations and events over time (1991–2021), allowing a recurrent initiation and inspection also of core products and work processes. The field work also included two research visits with rich informal dialogues and guided tours at HÅG’s factory as well as participation in many internal and external events, seminars, and exhibitions (see details in Jevnaker, 1991, 1993, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2012, 2014). The method is a qualitative inquiry following this company and some of its key designer relations in some projects and over time—from the early 1990s onwards for an explorative, phenomenological purpose.

In this paper, we have used Eisenhardt and Graebner (2007) to build a theory from single cases that fit into the Flokk (and embedded HÅG) case, drawing on a longitudinal study by one of us (see Jevnaker, 2012). We have further used Yin (1984) for the understanding of case research. Finally, we have used Schwartz and Stensaker (2014) for phenomenon-driven research. These methodological approaches have formed the basis for our explorative research.

The Norwegian company HÅG was established in Oslo in 1943, but it was almost bankrupt in 1974. However, a new leader and novel design development approach collaborating with external design studios for the first time helped re-focus the company and leverage its office chairs (Jevnaker, 1995). Production was already moved to another region (Røros), while the headquarters remained in Norway’s capital (Oslo). Since 1974, HÅG has taken advantage of creative designer-enterprise relations and manifold expertise in design development, delivery, communication, and corporate culture (Jevnaker, 2012). Developing high quality, innovative products, the company eventually succeeded in international markets, combined with continued leverage of product designs and production and delivery systems. This innovative company HÅG was later sold and merged with several other furniture companies into Flokk, another story. Flokk in 2020 had a turnover beyond 3 billion NOK and is a current market leader in office chairs in Europe (2020 Annual report).

In 2011 Flokk published its first sustainability report in GRI Format (Global Reporting Initiative), a thorough examination of every aspect of the company, creating a picture of their overall impact on the environment. Total design principles were introduced back in 1993. They started to use consumer recycled materials in some chair models, and “we're progressed the journey since then”, reflected Christian Lodgaard, Senior Vice-president (VP) of Products and Brands in Flokk (Jevnaker’s meeting observations at Flokk’s head office, January 28, 2020, and see Flokk, 2021).

One example of Flokk’s sustainability work is the use of recycled plastics, which has increased from year to year, reaching 735 tonnes in 2020, an increase from 664 tonnes the previous year. In 2021 the company targets a further increase to 1,000 tonnes (Flokk, 2021).

Our case firm Flokk has characteristics that challenge the dominating categories of organizational change, including the assumption that change efforts are extraordinary. Here episodic change and continuous development are typical properties of daily life. Processes of change take place both in parallel and as intertwined activity streams, both as stepwise punctuated change and organizational development, both as planned and emergent development, and both in the domains of exploitation as well as exploration. All these dichotomies have their more or less separate ongoing academic conversations (see, e.g., Pettigrew et al., 2001). Relating the case to these established streams of consciousness would imply cutting the empirical phenomenon into pieces and place them in á priori defined entities. In our view, this would not add much to the existing understanding and knowledge of design and change management. Instead, we try to conceptualize the phenomenon of parallel or intertwined multi-tasked changes where sustainability and design are parallel to or in fact incorporated into other multi-tasked changes.

5 Discussion: Short-Sighted or Continued Sustainability Design

5.1 Tinkering and Thinking Are Intertwined

From the early 1990s, both sustainability thinking and active experimentation have been present in the product design development of HÅG. In visits to the company’s product development department, the researcher interviewed the company’s first sustainability officer Kjersti Kviseth, and the supportive Carl P. Aaser, VP, head of research and development (R&D), later became VP for Environment (see Jevnaker, 1995, 2012). Kviseth, the sustainability officer, an educated industrial designer, enacted the then emergent sustainability thinking inside HÅG while having an open eye on what happened in research institutes and other knowledge-based milieus. The head of the product development department, Aaser, a highly experienced and reflective engineer, paid attention to several concrete sustainability concerns, such as industrial materials and chemicals used in office chairs. As VP for R&D, he took initiatives for designing chairs from the outset in more sustainable ways, including experimenting with fewer parts and reducing any toxic ingredients or otherwise non-sustainable elements in HÅG’s products (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012). He was also engaged in raising the sustainability aspirations beyond the standard industry levels, together with Torgeir Mjør Grimsrud, HÅG’s CEO and a later enthusiastic chairman. Grimsrud, Kviseth, and Aaser were instrumental in installing comprehensive thinking from the very start in exemplary development projects and, more generally, inside the company culture.

This broader sustainability thinking seems to have evolved and got a new surge, such as under the regime of the current VP for products and brands, Christian Lodgaard, rather than drifted away in Flokk’s later design and developments (see recurrent interviews, Jevnaker, 2012). Furthermore, it probably helped that Flokk’s key managers and teams have been working recurrently crossover with manifold highly qualified and reflexive industrial designers and engineering designers, as well as environmental and usability experts, in-house as well as out of the house. One of HÅG’s lead designers historically since 1974 is Peter Opsvik. This thoughtful designer and his studio team have worked highly human-centred as well as nature and environmentally conscious when co-creating in the Opsvik design studio as well as back and forth and interactively with HÅG’s project design teams, leaders, and specialists. They have argued for “long-life products” and the importance of sitting dynamically in chairs adapted to man’s work activities (Jevnaker, 1991, 1993, 2005, 2014; Opsvik, 2008). One highly experienced project manager of HÅG, who was an educated physiotherapist, started to work at Opsvik’s studio leaving HÅG formally (Jevnaker, 2012).

Designing beyond the standards of the field involved not only creative expertise in cross-disciplinary collaborations. It involved much tinkering and thinking imaginative “what if” and “so what”, as well as “why” and “where” the existing or new ways could be changed to become essential for the active sitting and good everyday use aims.

When talking recurrently with firsthand designer specialists, top leaders and managers from several functions at HÅG and Flokk and also participant-observing some external and internal meetings, we were shown actual workings with models, materials, parts, and developmental and communicative processings of their current, recent, or past design work. Always with objects and humans in dynamic use situations, together with rich reflections. Showing tangible and explaininig intangible details illuminated ways their work involved closely intertwined doings, sensings, and sayings, whether in the workshops or in special events engaging with the users’ varieties of active sitting; e.g., in an office open landscape or in a chamber music group or in a multi-task home work zone,or in another design firm’s studio. One of us took part in learning events both at the designer Opsvik’s studio and with the whole HÅG company present. Interestingly, the meaning-making was not merely a combined social and material engagement. Design sense-making was closely entangled with revisiting and literally being in the material, that is, sitting actively in the models and working with re-inventing or refining potential physical movements, materials, and components, while also taking in wild inspiration. Images shown included, for example, sitting like a bird in a tree or riding on a horse in a sadle or sitting naturally on your knees. One designer or one company could not have accomplished all this alone, one of the early innovators involved in this active sitting conception reflected (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012).

Over time, this enterprise has become dedicated to sustainable design and argues they “will continue moving forward” and “have set a number of ambitious goals” to track their progress, according to its leaders actively. As argued by the current CEO, Lars Röiri (Flokk, 2021):

When designing new products, we follow long-standing circular design criteria intended to limit the environmental footprint of our products. These guide how we assemble products and the materials we use and even dictate our high quality and timeless design, making for long-lasting products.

Currently, every Flokk product is designed according to a concept they call 5III—five circular design principles on three (III) focus areas that come together to create one sustainable lifecycle (see Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1
The principles for sustainable design contain five circular design criteria and three focus areas. The criteria are low weight, few components, right choice of materials, long life span, and design for disassembly. Focus areas are climate, resources and health.

(Source Flokk)

Flokk’s principles for sustainable design

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Accordingly, working with combining environmental, health-centred, and resource-saving focus areas and selective design principles has become essential for this enterprise. Nevertheless, the tinkering and its thinking for the common good based on the company’s mission are complex.

Flokk managers and designer allies early on took into consideration what happened also after the chairs had left the factories, in sales and transportation, as well as how they tended to become used by end-users. Chairs could be left in locked positions, but interestingly, even a transportation employee in HÅG could explain the chairs’ embodied possibilities (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012). From own research in other settings, we know that, for example, employees in retail contribute as “silent designers” by rearranging objects and materials in outlet spaces (Brøgger & Jevnaker, 2014). This silent designer-notion refers to people who do not call themselves designer and who may be unaware of their actual designing, which may lead to malpractices (see Gorb & Dumas, 1987; Jevnaker, 2012). By contrast, the extended and highly entangled tinkering and thinking with specialist designers and design-aware teams in Flokk and its partners over time point to the often overlooked enduring organizing for creative, sustainable design in and between enterprises and creative groups in theory and practice (Jevnaker, 2012; see also Chapter 1).

5.2 The Paradoxical Roles of Leadership in Making Sustainable Design

Good frameworks for understanding and working with sustainable design must make it possible to understand the continuous challenges and possibilities in design. Recycling is but one strategy in contemporary views on waste. Indeed, “blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better—and perhaps even worse—than doing nothing”, argue McDonough and Braungart (2002, p. 59). Overall, these authors argue for remaking the way we make things, which seldom is a straightforward process. Drawing on our past research, we reflect next on the paradoxical roles of leadership in remaking design approaches.

Flokk’s company motto is “different and better”, a motto rooted in HÅG’s entrepreneurial history and design leadership culture. Designers, managers, and developers have participated in rethinking sitting (Opsvik, 2008), which means they work with innovative new products inspired by sitting and seating artefacts in moving activity, health, and the environment (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012).

Considering the leadership roles in how this company makes things, there is much to learn for all parties experiencing the dynamics enacted by particularly creative sustainable design endeavours (Jevnaker, 1993; Jevnaker & Bruce, 1999). As the Scandinavian case illustrates, it has been possible to enact severe and playful work to achieve something more like long-lived products (Opsvik, 2008) with no or trim toxic materials (Flokk, 2021).

The efforts across time and several generations of chairs turned out to be essential, although design and development projects were organized ad hoc or, to some extent, project-by-project (Jevnaker, 2012). Sustainability also required longer-term design orientation after-sales and towards a variety of contemporary and future users. Continuous design became essential even when working with several quite different external designers. Moreover, the first environmental-responsible manager reflected that perhaps over 100 ways an office chair could be improved after being first developed and launched (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012).

Furthermore, the drive to leverage eco-effective design did not come mainly from the legislation in this field. Instead, the standard legislation in several advanced industrial countries could be experienced as “a barrier” to market unique office chairs beyond existing standards at the time, according to our informants (Jevnaker, 1995, 2012).

Behind the active sitting philosophy, we could identify recurring efforts of making sense (cf. Weick, 1995) of what was being designed and developed. Also, as identified in all the involved cases, reframing the new may need to be conceived, tested, and continually worked upon and refined (Jevnaker, 1993, 2014). Leveraging this kind of evolvement is essential because creative designing can change or shape the boundaries of many other business functions, from procurement, production, marketing, branding, logistics, and customer interactions (Jevnaker, 2012; Jevnaker & Bruce, 1999; Press & Cooper, 2003).

As happened at another furniture-making company STOKKE (see, also, Høidal, 2007), which was also involved in this active sitting experimentation in a group of designers, innovators, and business parties, the whole traditional sales apparatus was at some point replaced, and new people were recruited (Jevnaker, 2012). New middle managers and many international links and intermediate entities have, however, learned to communicate and grasp the “what” and “why” of both STOKKE’s and HÅG’s as well as Flokk’s new offerings. Interestingly, a broad ‘inaugurative learning’ (Jevnaker, 1993) into essential aspects of sustainable design unfolded recurrently in and across these organizations. Also, verbal communication and visuals such as video recording for the sustainable design help do the signalling and “talking” over time. When constituting both a co-creating intensive technology and a mediating (signalling and linking) technology, creative design may thus rightly be regarded as challenging to manage (Jevnaker, 2014). Difficult because creative design embraces many dynamic factors in human workplaces, health, and environmental concerns. As pinpointed by Atle This-Messel, Flokk’s current Vice-President Environment:

As a company and a manufacturer of high-end office seating, we are acting now. Globally, perhaps the difference we are making today is modest. Nevertheless, our mission—as our products, name, and philosophy grow increasingly familiar in the market—will help seed other initiatives and inspire others to change their behaviour.

In other words, the mission of Flokk works like a vision for growth and changing behaviours in their markets.

5.3 Requirements for Successful Proactive Change and Design Efforts

Change efforts tend to be reactive, discontinuous, and often triggered by a situation of organizational crisis (By, 2005, p. 370). It is to say that organizations need a clear impetus before they change. HÅG started its turnaround with a new collaboration with a professional designer in the midst of being almost bankrupt, in the early 1970s (Jevnaker, 1995). In our Flokk case, it is however not only crisis or imperfections that trigger managers and specialists to work with changes but they are already practising proactive design innovating based on established competencies working with and seeking to articulate future user needs in mind. In fact, leading managers have shifted several times but recurrent strivings and loops of innovative and sustainable designing seem incorporated (Jevnaker, 2012) in the whole enterprising as a formative underlying context (Ciborra, 2009).

Here, knowledge and competence are not entirely internal in the firm but unfold interestingly through recurrent co-creation in designer-enterprise partnerships and enduring experimentation also in some designers’ workshops (Jevnaker, 2005, 2012; Opsvik, 2008). These findings highlight the importance of leveraging not only sustainable design as a “thing” but rather sustainability-oriented practices in designer-enterprise relations (Jevnaker, 2012). The strivings in collaborative “design alliances” (Bruce & Jevnaker, 1998) may unfold in both temporary and enduring processes (Table 6.2).

Table 6.2 Sustainable designing as potential multifaceted organization practicesa
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The practices unfolding in creative, sustainable design strivings can in fact help strategically reimagine and impact multifaceted enterprise processes over time but may also be less understood in other cases (Jevnaker & Bruce, 1999).

Flokk today has enough internal knowledge, experience, and competence to discuss, evaluate, and set a direction for potential co-creating partners, and various subcontractors. They continue to experiment with several design groups, working with sustainability in action issues embedded in specific innovation projects, as well as working with concrete development aspirations over time. Managers and design specialists engage in transdisciplinary learning and future imagination as well as own history cultivation, as we could observe in design seminars at the factory in Røros and at the Oslo headquarter. The episodic changes represented with the building of new, contemporary but long-lived design furniture have become strategically oriented practices guided by a dynamic vision about future needs in the market supported by in-company competences.

5.4 On Vision and Mission

In the literature on strategy, organizational change, and design, we find various meanings of the expression vision. Today many organizations have both a vision and a mission statement. Most of them are unclear, do not motivate people, nor focus attention, and may not mean something to the people in the organization. Hence, most of them seem ineffective as a compiling guiding force. They are usually nothing more than a monotonous stream of words (Collins & Porras, 1991, p. 31).

Both mission and vision statements can be “artifact concepts which are deliberately used to create purposeful, collective action. They do so by making gaps visible” (Normann, 2001, p. 276). Vision is about an envisioned future (Collins & Porras, 1996) and implies a gap between an imagined future state and the present state, or situation. The mission of a company expresses its raison d`être; why does it exist? What is the role in contemporary society related to the value-creating domain in which it participates? So, the mission describes what difference the existence makes to the context where the firm functions. Normann (2001, p. 278) discusses interrelations between mission and vision. One of his conclusions is that remembered leaders are those who had a vision formulated in terms of a mission—“vision as mission design entrepreneurs”.

Extending Normann’s view, the leaders of Flokk and some of their long-term design thinkers will be remembered for having co-created and formulated a vision in terms of a mission. This became embedded in an enlarged sustainability societal thinking, e.g., through HÅG’s former CEO recurrently stressing that “man is not created to sit” and adding images of dynamic sitting (on a horseback, etc.) and always concluding “the world needs to be refurnished!” (Jevnaker, 1991, 2012).

For Selznick (1957), an organization can emerge if it stands for values, mission, or purpose, meaningful in a larger context. However, it is not enough with a fit between purpose and values, on the one hand, and the external world, on the other. The mission is institutionalized when the fundamental values are embodied in the organization. Selznick (1957, p. 141) called “distinct competence” the ability to achieve a fit between the external world, the purpose and value, and the social organization that embodies them. We argue it is a systemic concept expressing dynamic fit between elements but this can be better understood as recurrently co-created through activities (Follett, 1924/1951; Jevnaker, 1993). It is such distinctive competence in action that energizes the proactive changes in Flokk. Flokk has found a meeting point between effectiveness and efficiency based upon tinkering and thinking, including internal and external co-creation and coordination.

Finally, how to understand this broader energizing and dynamic duration of sustainable design in a metaphorical sense? We acknowledge it is not easy to put into words how creative, sustainable design actually unfolds when becoming “multi-tasked” in the everyday concrete workings often continuing in the designer’s or co-innovator’s dreaming, as well as in further experiments, conversations, and eventual realizations, sometimes becoming seen as constitutive elements in organizational changes. Jevnaker (2012) used the metaphor of white ocean to capture the intense interactions and creative breakings in design innovation. Here we have drawn on two other methaphors used in organization literature.

Energy comes from co-creating vision, mission, and values infused as meaning in the organization (i.e., from distinctive competence), reinforced by consistent managerial decisions and shreds of evidence of success “that speaks to” the organization that mission and values create appropriate results. In addition, coherence between expressed wants and actual behaviour (walk the talk) infuses energy by creating a sense of trust and acknowledgment between employees.

The processor metaphor opens creative thinking on how change and design processes flow and can be managed, such as sequential (batch), parallel, and selectively combinated activities. However, new combinations can also be intendedly or spontaneously probed, for example, in interaction design, in complex, uncertain tinkering between companies and design groups. We propose complex and uncertain sustainable design really needs both distinctive competence and energizing in action to progress and become sustained. Interestingly, design thinking in-between HÅG and design studios became openly enlargened and could recurrently suffuse the whole Flokk.

6 Conclusions

This chapter unpacks the critical twin aspects of design in enterprises and design for ecological sustainability regarding design tinkering and design thinking. Grounded in our research, we also identified the importance of sustaining imaginative mission work over considerable time.

To contribute to the development of knowledge concerning organizational change, we set out to conceptualize the phenomenon of proactive design changes. We wanted answers to how contemporary change and design processes and their interplay can occur in a competitive and also collaborative economy.

In conclusion, we found that sustainable design became realized through several emergent and dynamically combined processes; e.g., both in projects and in everyday work practices. Recurrent tinkering and thinking were unfolding with design specialist studios, cross-disciplinary teams, and entrepreneurial managers, affecting also employees and collaborating partners. The specific strivings over time contributed to reimagining better and different long-lived products for active sitting. Taking in firsthand experiences from within as well as following several of the key actors and their practices from the outside, tinkering and thinking through innovative and sustainable design strivings was no doubt entangled.

Focussing on the change-makers in Flokk, we wanted to identify and capture elements that energize and characterize change and design in such organizations. Primarily we wanted to conceptualize the phenomenon of interest, not test theories. We think we have reached a set of significant contributions to the topic:

  • First, in this enterprise study focussing on proactive changes, dynamic tinkering, and emergent thinking, we found that organizational technology (Thompson, 1967) was essential for understanding change and complex design processes. In this kind of industry, this unfolds, for example, in both intensely interacting design development workshops and in fast long-linked technologies from the customer order to the delivery, as in the Flokk case. It is almost unbelievable that this issue has not been a central topic in organizational change and design research.

  • Second, based on empirical observations, we revisited two metaphors, energy and processor, with associations to how proactive change and dynamic design can take place. In complex and uncertain sustainability-oriented design, energizing seems critical to enact, leverage, and continue sustainable innovation work. Processing can perhaps help us understand to both focus and creatively recombine our performative processes, to make sustainable design work. At Flokk, efforts started small as is common in innovation, but processing recurrently over many years with transdisciplinary expertise and leadership with other development processes and materials close to hand, helped co-create sustainability-oriented practices. These practices recently became translated into a combination of five specified design principles for three focus areas.

  • Third, the partnerships, as well as continuous collection and sharing of knowledge across entities through formal and informal channels are of crucial importance for creating and selecting solutions and linking activities in the direction of the dynamic understanding of their motto and mission.

We have shown that the categories of continuous and episodic change and sustainable design can be intertwined in proactive co-creating change efforts. It should be interesting to explore to which extent this is due to dynamics in the contextual situation or has broader relevance for emergent practicing.