Redefining success: designing systemic sustainable strategies

Abstract In an increasingly complex and interconnected global society, the need to redefine ‘success’ has become an imperative for the survival, sustainability and continued evolution of social systems and their interdependent environments. A wide range of contemporary human institutions—from corporations to governments, schools and universities—narrowly focus their structures, functions, and processes (and the strategies that create them) on the attainment of individualistic, and often myopic, conceptions of success. More often than not, success is defined in egocentric and competitive win‐lose terms and is primarily measured according to standards of monetary accumulation. Such a definition is at the heart of the currently unsustainable path of human social evolution at the dawn of the 21 st century, and its inadequacy represents a serious challenge for contemporary conceptions of capitalism. This paper explores and presents a more comprehensive definition of success: one that embraces financial, social and environmental sustainability as the cornerstones of a holistic approach to value creation and gives rise to conditions for life‐affirming dynamics of value exchange to unfold in perpetuity. It is suggested, that this would both re‐humanize and re‐vitalize capitalism with a much needed (though not unprecedented) claim to an evolutionary and life‐sustaining ethic. Evolutionary systems design (ESD) is described as an approach to the creation of systemic sustainable strategies. ESD is best understood as a heuristic approach that supports and guides the participatory co‐creation of sustainable and evolutionary futures. It is grounded in idealized systems design and evolutionary systems theory and embraces theoretical and methodological complementarism from a critical systems perspective. As such, it represents a future‐creating form of participatory inquiry that provides a mean by which organizations and communities may achieve success—not in a narrow self‐serving sense, but in one that is systemic and evolutionary. Through presentation of ways in which to engage in strategic design conversations, this paper illustrates the potential of ESD as a praxis by which to foster the evolutionary corporation and, in so doing, to guide the evolutionary transformation of business. It is intended as part of the active research of the authors and should be understood as an expression of an ongoing exposition on ESD, treating the issue of strategic design here and leaving that of strategic planning for subsequent presentation. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.