Sustainable Decision-Making: Moving Beyond People, Planets, and Profits

Abstract

This chapter highlights the immense difficulty of achieving sustainability unless the language of business changes from an obsessive focus on profit, and leaders use new frameworks to view business problems. Traditional framing in business includes the worlds of accounting, warfare, sports, and games, which are at odds with humanistic and holistic approach essential to developing leaders with the courage and engagement needed to address the challenge of the sustainability of our planet. The chapter introduces the need for a new language for sustainable business, examines the unhappiness of the millennial generation with the current language, and explores how business-as-usual changes when a more holistic language is used. The chapter then examines how when the decision-making frame changes from one of war and losses to one of community and social learning, decision makers are more likely to reframe both their goals and the focus of their analysis to go beyond monetary outcomes to include socially and environmentally sustainable outcomes. It also analyzes the role of holistic language, motivation and appropriateness in moving organizational cultures from a single-minded profit focus to one of triple bottom line sustainability. The chapter ends with a road map and several examples of how organizations can change the way they frame sustainability problems, develop new goals that are holistic in nature and aligned with global sustainability goals, and implement metrics to keep track of real progress towards sustainability.