Putting resilient sustainability into strategy decisions – case studies

The purpose of this paper is to report the results of testing a new approach to strategic sustainability and resilience – Sustainable Resilient Strategic Decision-Support (SuReSDS™).

The approach was developed and tested using action-research case studies at industrial companies. It successfully allowed the participants to capture different types of value affected by their choices, optimise each strategy’s resilience against different future scenarios and compare the results to find a “best” option.

SuReSDS™ enabled a novel integration of environmental and social sustainability into strategy by considering significant risks or opportunities for an enhanced group of stakeholders. It assisted users to identify and manage risks from different kinds of sustainability-related uncertainty by applying resilience techniques. Users incorporated insights into real-world strategies.

Since the case studies and test organisations are limited in number, generalisation from the results is difficult and requires further research.

The approach enables companies to utilise in-house and external experts more effectively to develop sustainable and resilient strategies.

The research described develops theories linking sustainability and resilience for organisations, particularly for strategy, to provide a new consistent, rigorous and flexible approach for applying these theories. The approach has been tested successfully and benefited real-world strategy decisions.