Ecosphere Net Blog

Ecosphere Net member Mallary Tytel, PhD, MBA, and I will be co-hosting a panel discussion/presentation this upcoming weekend in Orlando, Florida at the American Evaluation Association’s annual meeting.

In our presentation, entitled, “A Systems Approach toward Evaluating the Triple Bottom Line” we consider organizational leadership, organizational development and their role in evolving improvement in a company’s triple bottom line. Our perspective will be from that of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Using tools and language from complexity science and the field of Human Systems Dynamics, we will focus on opportunities for effecting and measuring change in large and small ways. 

“Triple Bottom Line” refers to the objective of focusing not just on the single bottom line of profit, as has historically been the case, but rather on the more socially responsible – and inherently more profitable over the long-term – bottom line of people, planet and profit. 

Among other topics regarding CAS, we consider systems control v. emergence along supply chains from the local to the global.  Today’s management and organizational development leaders are realizing that the complexity of global supply chains precludes their full control. In fact, it’s often better to let organizational development and leadership emerge rather than to attempt to control it.

The challenge in organizational development is to know how much of each is just right in an evolving situtation. How much to let emerge and how much to control in organizational development; and how to optimize organizational leadership within that balance. That is where evaluation comes in. 

Mallary is interested in exploring self-organization in a CAS and its relationship to improving the triple bottom line.  Her focus is in developing simple tools to assist small- and medium-sized businesses and organizations in developing strategic and tactical approaches to sustainability. 

My own focus is on how to identify the characteristics and skills of the individual leaders that are best suited for this endeavor of working within an organization that sees itself, as more and more rightfully are, as a CAS. 

Through our work in research and developing the evaluation of leadership and organizations within the real world corporate context of complex adaptive systems, Mallary and I hope to help move our world closer to a sustainable global future.

More information on Mallary’s work can be found at her website Healthy Workplaces. 

EJ Wensing

US Virgin Islands

ejwensing@ecosphere.net