Leapfrogging through retrospection: Ferreting out sustainability integration within organisations

Abstract

Throughout the last 15 years, I was able to support and guide several companies with addressing sustainability challenges. By asking for my help, these companies already proved to be aware of the importance of sustainability for their businesses. Moreover, they had converted this awareness into action: they asked me, an actor external to their organisations, what to do and how to do it. While defining what sustainability could mean to their business, I ended up by asking them about how they used to do their business; what was successful and why it was so successful. Although this might sound more like digging into a company’s history, my goal was to help them to improve their understanding of who they really were and what actions could best benefit their particular organisations. I used retrospective analysis of corporate actions on addressing sustainability to support them in making – smaller or bigger - leapfrogs towards adhering to their vision on addressing sustainability. Many company leaders asked me to write down my thoughts on how to do this retrospective analysis and how this contributes to an improved adherence to a corporate vision on addressing sustainability. This PhD thesis is my answer to that question.