Sustainability Needs a System to Succeed

Sustainability Needs a System

Embrace, support, and promote effective environmental and safety systems.

Practitioners: tactical, integrative, and strategic

Sustainability has become a buzz word today. Unfortunately, from my perspective, it has also lost its meaning and importance. Protecting our environment means avoiding contamination that could injure or harm ourselves or our communities. With that simplified view, it is easy to see the relationship between the environmental and safety mindsets. Sustainability, to me, is the core idea here. What we put into our environment must also be removed. If we learn to embrace, support, and promote these systems, we can avoid many unnecessary and unforeseen problems. Sustainability needs a system to succeed.

Respect for every individual is a lean principle that sneaks into my thinking regarding this topic. If we truly respect everyone, we would be cautious about how we impact the environment. We should also be very careful about the risks we expose our team members to in their work. Once again, the relationship between environmental and safety concerns is rather easy to recognize. We begin to see the strength of respect for every individual as a principle.

Another key word in the topic is system. What exactly is a system and how would we embrace, support, and promote systems within our organization? Operational excellence requires of us a system and process mindset. A system is a unit of processes that work together for a certain purpose. Each system must have a clearly defined purpose and means of measuring the successful achievement of said purpose. With these system measures, we can then evaluate the processes for their contribution to the system and the greater organization. Ownership comes into focus for me. Sponsorship comes into focus, as well.

Sustainability Needs a System to Succeed

When sponsors, process owners, and team members are aligned and working together toward a purpose with clear measures and frequent evaluations regarding what is missing or what is in the way of accomplishing the measurable objectives, we can all work together to move forward. Sounds like operational excellence to me. With that in mind, it seems this topic is simply suggesting that environmental and safety are important enough to formalize systems around their clearly defined objectives. I would challenge an executive team to define their own purpose and objectives for these two important concepts and begin their journey toward excellence.