Imagine this. A large organization wants to make its services and the whole organization more sustainable. So the order comes and says: "Change everything to be sustainable now!" What an inspiring order, right?

In a not imaginary world, you wouln't have to wait long to see this type of reactions: "But we can't! The dicks from HQ don't allow us to change our IT system! It's not our work to change you guys have to change!"

And then we're blocked and frustrated.

Making services more sustainable in a big organization is a pain in the ass. My mate Michel has a great tip to tackle this mess and make it easier. Instead of trying to move the whole organization at once, split the tasks, decisions and sub-projects into the layers of the organization.

For the sustainability project Michel worked on these layers were: organizational layer, site layer, and individual layer (1).

Each layer then knows what they have the power to work on. That makes things move faster and you cut down the frustration by a lot as people work on things they can actually change.

Action question

What are the different levels of authority in your organization, and which actions will you assign to each level to make your service and organization more sustainable?

Footnote

(1) For example, in a large organization, a local site usually can’t change the building they’re in or the IT infrastructure they use.—that’s decided by some people in an HQ. But locally a site team can choose the coffee machine, how lunches are organized, if they switch to a clean energy provider, decide what gets printed, and manage local work processes. These are things within their control. The same goes for HQ. HQ can't force people to switch from coffee to just plain water. But it can switch the IT servers to use green energy.

The inspiration behind this principle

This principle is based on a conversation I had with Michel Sterckx, a project manager working on a big sustainability project for the Salvation Army in Switzerland. The conversation was in French:

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Written with AI help
This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand. The whole intro has been rewritten by hand as it sucked.