From conflict to progress: A blueprint for sustainability success

From tackling the impact of climate change to working out how to allocate scarce water resources and protect biodiversity, some of the world’s biggest challenges are found in the sustainability sphere.  

To meet these enormous global challenges, we will need large-scale collaborations involving businesses, big science, Government and a range of other stakeholders, with each bringing their own expertise and resources to the table. Too often, however, these efforts break down because each of the various players has different interests and cannot find a way to move past them to reach their common goal, even if it is as vital as cutting greenhouse gas emissions.  

At first sight, achieving these large common goals is in everyone’s interests. But in practice, when it comes to implementation, almost immediately different interests emerge. Private sector companies want to make money, while academic and public sector organisations are keen to keep costs down. Nobody wants to compromise, which leads to inaction and conflict that stops progress.  

One example of this is shipping, where efforts to decarbonise have run up against the differing interests of the proponents of various fuels ranging from methanol to ammonia to hydrogen, as well as ship operators, the brands and manufacturers that are their customers, engine manufacturers and governments.

Yet shipping has an excellent example of how collaboration to create a common standard can hugely benefit everyone, in the form of the Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU), the shipping container that can be found on every cargo ship and in every port in the world. 

Research that I carried out with colleagues from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam suggests a framework that will enable mega-collaborations to tackle these 'wicked' problems more effectively. 

The research looked at a project involving Europe’s three biggest scientific institutions – CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and home to the Large Hadron Collider; the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL); and the European Space Agency (ESA), and a host of technology providers of different sizes. 

Although involved in very different areas of research, all three bodies required increasing amounts of computing power to process the huge amounts of data they were being generated, and so scientists often had to wait months to have their data analysed. 

After each body separately explored commercial cloud services, the three organisations realised that a better solution would be a Europe-wide cloud computing infrastructure, which eventually became known as Helix Nebula Science Cloud. The collaboration began in 2011 and ended in 2018, growing from 20 to 80 organisations, including some of the largest cloud computing providers and a range of smaller suppliers. 

While the project fairly quickly ran into challenges, it was able to push through these barriers, and we wanted to see how this was possible. The lessons we learned are highly applicable to the fight against climate change and other large-scale collective action problems. 

We found that using a range of technical and organisational 'boundary tools' can help to keep the process moving forward. 

Boundary objects are artifacts or concepts that facilitate communication and collaboration between different groups (for example, blueprints or computer-aided design models in large engineering or green infrastructure projects). In the fight against climate change, they could be rules governing the introduction of renewable energy sources onto electricity networks, or efforts to upgrade the grid to cope with these sources. 

Sustainability: Why we need a boundary infrastructure

But individual boundary objects are not enough on their own. They cannot match the scope and speed at which these massive projects, such as grid upgrades or the decarbonisation of the vehicle fleet, evolve. Instead, companies and governments need to create a 'boundary infrastructure' of multiple objects that can serve many different project members at the same time. 

These objects operate as a form of 'scaffolding' that allow project members to solve problems as they arise. The key is not to try to make one thing perfect before addressing the next challenge. If you hit a problem, move on to developing a solution to that problem, whether that is a technological fix like developing electric vehicles (EV) or an organisational one like setting agreed standards for EV chargers. 

In the case of Helix Nebula, these boundary objects included technical tools such as a fibre-optic network to provide data connection between project members, and organisational tools such as a shared procurement model and a non-disclosure agreement that made companies happier to share confidential information with competitors. 

Another key to keeping the project moving was the creation of dynamic coalitions that changed as needs evolved over time. Because the organisations involved in these huge projects are so diverse and their interests so different, they may agree on one thing but not another. Developing coalitions whose membership and focus can change very quickly to adapt to different problems can keep things moving by bringing partners together to collaborate where their interests align and keeping them apart when they don’t. 

A vital element in making this work is the presence of smaller companies and organisations as well as large ones. If coalitions contain only large organisations, they tend to view the process only in terms of competition with their rivals, but the smaller actors will move between coalitions as their needs require, making it easier to keep everyone on board and to make progress. 

Competition and conflict are not necessarily bad, though – in fact they can be essential to the collaboration process. If the common needs are strong enough, competition is a good thing because it allows a number of coalitions to come together to develop different solutions and then agreement to be reached on the best one to use.  

Often collaborations stop at the moment of conflict – but that is where collaboration becomes most interesting. If you reach an impasse, that is not an excuse to give up. Nor is it just an obstacle to be overcome. Instead, it is an essential part of coming up with a better solution. 

Key to these processes is a structure of informal co-operation – something that businesses and research institutions alike can be uncomfortable with. There is a tendency to look at these types of solutions as something that can be pre-designed, but the starting point should always be the problem that needs to be solved. You should start more openly and let the governance emerge from the project’s requirements.  

This can be difficult for businesses to grasp, because they don’t want to get involved in a collaboration where it is unclear how decisions are going to be made and who is going to pay for it.

For companies to take this enormous leap of faith, the stakes need to be high enough and sufficiently commercially interesting to companies. In the case of Helix Nebula, with the three biggest scientific institutions in Europe, the business potential for the cloud computing companies was so large that they were willing to take on significant financial risks. We’re reaching that point with many climate and sustainability issues, too. 

To tackle the world’s most intractable problems, including climate change, we need large-scale collaborations involving dozens of actors. And the types of tools that helped make Helix Nebula a success will be crucial to keep these alliances on track so that they can help to meet the challenges ahead. This boundary infrastructure needs to be both robust enough to deal with any conflicts and flexible enough to adapt to the changing needs of the project.  

For companies, investors and other stakeholders, climate change is unavoidable and addressing it will require some uncomfortable collaborations, compromises and conflicts. But if they can lean into those conflicts, the frameworks that emerge will enable us all to make progress. 

Further reading:

Beyond the balance sheet: Accounting for sustainability

Ten unexpected skills you need to measure social impact

Regulating AI use could stop its rampant energy demand

Five steps for companies to deliver the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Jochem Hummel is Associate Professor of Information Systems Management and teaches Digital Transformation on the MBA programme plus Digital Business Strategy on the MSc Management of Information Systems & Digital Innovation. He also lectures on Managing Strategy in the Digital Era on the Undergraduate programme.

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