If you want to change big things in big organizations, like making your organization better at caring for people and the planet, you can't just do one thing (1). You often have to mix approaches. You can mix things that the big bosses decide (top-down actions) and things that the workers themselves put in place based on what they feel is important and relevant locally or in their context (bottom-up initiatives).

In large organizations that mix can also look pretty different in every department. For example the IT department might be able to do a lot of changes by just deciding at the top, because workers "just have to" use the given tools. But how things are done in a local branch my need much more top down approaches that fit the very different contexts.

Action Question:

Which parts of your organization or service will benefit more from a bottom-up approach and which parts need top-down actions to make things sustainable?

Footnotes

• (1) I imagine that slowly but surely you get one thing from this book: there's no magic formula. Better serving the humans you work with and for while caring for the planet that hosts them can be done in many different ways.

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 and in fact rewrote most of it as I didn't like the structure, even if the notes helped.