Use Strategic Thinking to Pursue Sustainability Collaboratively

Katrina (Kate) Pugh, PhD is a consultant, researcher and educator, focused on strategy, networks and sustainability. Since 2011, she has taught at Columbia University’s Information and Knowledge Strategy’s M.S. Program, for which she was the Academic Director. Kate earned a PhD from UMaine (Ecology and Environmental Science), SM/MBA from MIT, and a BA in Economics from Williams College.

  Strategy   Sustainability  

The PMI Global Megatrends 2024 report concludes that we have to collaborate to survive. We cannot solve economic, environmental or digital threats in isolation, as many problems cross the boundaries of organization, discipline and geography.

For example, even if we think we have the talent in house to produce and scale a renewable energy product, we are physically and economically better off sharing the blueprint and iterating it with other organizations and institutions than trying to scale it up on our own. The technology—solar, wind, energy storage, bioplastics, etc. —is just moving too fast.

Yet collaboration doesn’t just happen, despite our romantic notions of sports teams in movies like Bend it Like Beckham (2002). It takes three things: shared intent, structures to continuously align people, and investments into interpersonal trust, or “psychological safety.”

In this article, we describe collaborations necessary for sustainability. Then we explore the elements of a deliberate, collaborative design process called “strategic thinking,” and explore why it should be the throughline of all the other forms of sustainability collaboration.

Scales of Collaboration
First, let’s consider different collaboration scales. Depending on the sustainability actors’ interdependencies and their goals, we need to tune our …

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