Personal Sustainability: Without It, Your Company Can't be Sustainable

The Necessary Shift for Creating Sustainable Organizations

In previous blog posting, I introduced a new sustainability model that emphasizes the interdependency of four sustainability segments inside organizations: Environmental Sustainability, Social Sustainability, Organizational Sustainability, and Personal Sustainability. The key difference of this model: Personal Sustainability must be at the center of any sustainability program. If it is not, environmental, organizational or social sustainability efforts are ineffective and don't last. Their effectiveness goes down the tube the moment Personal Sustainability is jeopardized.

What is Personal Sustainability?

Personal Sustainability is NOT about Money. This is contrary to what most of us think. The quest for money - the belief that "more is better" - got us into this economic mess and highly unsustainable position in the first place. To create organizations that are truly sustainable - from people to planet - we need to understand what Personal Sustainability really means. How can it be created inside an organization, and what keeps us away from it in our day-to-day lives?

Most companies equate Personal Sustainability with a decent pay check, pushing other important aspects, such as Balance or Well-Being, to the back-burner. Even more neglected are Growth and Contribution, two human needs that are key for sustaining us as individuals. They hardly ever make it to an employer's sustainability list. To make a point: most people work more or less happily, making decent money, without feeling balanced, fulfilled, or truly enthused about their work. Let me state this more bluntly: in assessing many hundred companies, I have found that the current way we work is fundamentally broken. It only works for about 5% of our population. The rest of us - more than 9 out of 10 people - struggle either with money or with time. That is not sustainable.

If we constantly struggle with money or time - if we are not living sustainably in a true sense, because we are on a quest to accumulate money, or because we are fighting exhaustion - how can we build sustainable organizations? What's needed to create truly sustainable organizations is a culture shift that allows people live and work in a manner that is sustainable and financially successful.

Shift: The Reason for Stress & Struggle

To create a sustainable business, it is necessary to shift away from the paradigm that governs most of today's organizations: The Model of Dominance & Subservience. This Neolithic model is based on lack - on the assumption that there's not enough for everybody. As a result, we think we must dominate the resources that are critical for our survival, or we will have to become subservient to a Dominator. In former times the critical resource for survival was land, because it provided access to food. In today's world this resource is money. Our entire culture - our education, businesses, governments, even family dynamics - are built around the accumulation of money or possessions, so we can ultimately be among the 1% of Dominators. We learn that the accumulation of money or possessions guarantees a happy life, but looking at people around us, we can see that this is not the case. But still, we work harder, we do more, and we sacrifice our authenticity as well as our personal sustainability with the goal to end up in Dominator-Land.

As stated: the model of Dominance & Subservience is based on lack and the fear that we do not have the resources to survive. And where there's fear, there cannot be flow. This implies, that as long as we operate within the paradigm of Dominance & Subservience, we will experience struggle and stress in our personal lives and in our businesses. And as long stress and struggle persists, sustainability remains a fantasy.

In the next blog post, I'll discuss the Dominance & Subservience model in more detail to understand what's necessary to break away from this model.