Elsevier

Futures

Volume 127, March 2021, 102699
Futures

Beyond the lifetime of organizations: A framework for multi-generational goal survival in the ecology of goals

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2021.102699Get rights and content

Highlights

  • There exists an ecology of goals through which goals compete with each other for survival under conditions of shock events.

  • The completion of initiative often requires goal survival beyond the lifetime of individual organizations via inter-organizational adoption.

  • The spectrum of organizations available to adopt goals is determined by capability, appropriateness, autonomy, as well as the interest and time horizon of decision makers.

  • The orientation that decision makers have towards the future is critical for addressing existential threats to our species.

Abstract

The completion of initiatives designed to address wicked problems often requires the participation of a variety of actors spanning multiple generations of both individuals and organizations. Until now, frameworks for addressing problems and articulating the sustainability of goals related to overcoming them have yet to adequately account for the timespans required for addressing such problems; particularly as far as the lifecycle of organizations is shorter than such timespans. Here, a framework is presented to articulate the survival of goals to the point of initiative completion under conditions in which it is not assumed that any individual organization or subunit exists long enough to fulfill the requirements for completing such initiatives.

Introduction

Some of the concerns most pressing to decision makers in organizations concerned with public affairs, such as poverty and disease spread, have taken multiple generations of organizations to address (Peters, 2019; Scott & Davis, 2016). Organizational structures as broad as collaborations between the public, private, and nonprofit sectors (Koliba, Meek, & Zia, 2010) to those as specific as regional economic development organizations (U.S. Congressional Research Service, 2020) and local civil society organizations (LeRoux & Feeney, 2015) define the organizational terrain that the decision makers working on initiatives to address such concerns operate within.

Existing frameworks have provided the groundwork to address a variety of mechanisms salient to the completion of such initiatives; notably those that concern interactions between actors and organizations, such as the institutional collective action framework (Feiock, 2013), collaborative governance regimes framework (Emerson, Nabatchi, & Balogh, 2012), and the ecology of games framework (Lubell, 2013). These and other frameworks have been able to enlighten researchers about how individuals and organizations collaborate to achieve shared goals, the conditions under which they do not, and how this impacts wider networks of actors. However, existing frameworks have yet to articulate the mechanisms that allow for goals, and consequentially the initiatives associated with them, to survive beyond the lifecycle of the organizations that adopt such goals. This is particularly salient as far as actors vary in the extent to which their goals are the result of orientation towards the future. This framework seeks to address how goals – particularly those that correspond to initiatives that rest beyond the lifetime of individual organizations – are sustained and adopted in an ecology of goals. This may be utilized by researchers investigating questions in the field of futures studies and particularly those contributing to the intersection between futures studies and sustainability.

Investigating the survival of goals beyond the lifecycle of individual organizations that contribute to their sustainability is important as far as the completion of initiatives corresponding to such goals require the contribution of multiple generations of organizations in order to be completed. Independent of the success or failure of organizations to address concerns more proximate in time, the goals that pertain to addressing existential crises such as climate change, disease spread, radioactive contamination, and failing to escape our own solar system prior to the death of the sun, are beyond the scope of a single generation of organizations. The sustainability of the human project is contingent on addressing these crises and is consequentially dependent on the responsibility that each generation of people take on (Moynihan, 2020) to sustain the goals required to do so in their consideration of future generations.

This proposed framework focuses on the mechanisms that address the survival of such goals to the point of initiative completion, which is related to, but distinct from, program and organizational sustainability (Bardach, 1976). While initiatives allow for goals to be successfully met, organizations can adopt goals in ways that allow for the sustainability of such goals until initiative completion while other organizations may be required in order to adopt those goals in ways that allow for the completion of the initiative, defining goal success. For example, public school teachers can sustain the goal of sending humans to Mars through enlightening their students about career paths that would allow them to become astronauts and collaborating with the NASA STEM Engagement & Educator Professional Development Collaborative (National Aeronautics & Space Administration, 2020). However, public schools as organizations cannot adopt the aforementioned goal in ways that allow for the completion of the initiative to develop technology capable of sending people to Mars, as public schools lack the resources required to do so. Goal survival is a necessary condition for goal success, while initiative completion contingent on goal survival is a sufficient condition for goal success. In this case, public schools may achieve some of the necessary conditions for sustaining the goal of sending people to Mars while additional public or private organizations, such as NASA or SpaceX, may be required to meet the sufficient conditions for developing technology required for goal completion.

This framework is developed to enlighten researchers and practitioners about the role and intersection of intra-organizational goal survival and inter-organizational goal adoption, with an emphasis on the time horizon of individuals in explaining the sustainability of goals for initiatives to be realized in remote times. To begin, each goal appropriate for this framework has an initiative or series of initiatives that correspond(s) to its realization, for which goal completion defines success within this framework. As the goals embedded within mission statements, contracts, or institutional narratives concern initiatives to be completed at increasingly distant points in time, these documents/narratives, or at least the goals embedded within them, must be maintained for increasingly long spans of time while avoiding goal revision and mission drift (Bryson, 2018) unless it can be assumed that the goal will be revived by organizations in the future within a period that allows for goal completion.

For example, the goal of achieving 100 % renewable energy by the year 2050, as advocated for by House Resolution 5221, otherwise known as the 100 % Clean Economy Act of 2019 (100% Clean Economy Act of 2019, 2019, 100% Clean Economy Act of 2019, 2019), requires maintaining that goal for the span of time between now and the year 2050. While the failure of the bill’s sponsors to get this bill through committee does not mean that this goal cannot be revived later, it does mean that this goal has failed to be adopted by any of the organizations that the bill’s supporters intended to adopt the goal, which may make goal achievement increasingly difficult as 2050 approaches.

This bill operates such that under conditions of passage it would copy this goal of achieving 100 % renewable energy by 2050 to both a new Clean Economy Federal Advisory Committee and to existing federal agencies by requiring agency heads to develop a plan of action. While the multiple organizations adopting the goal may provide for a better chance of goal survival, it is not evident which agencies or organizations, such as the advisory committee, will persist long enough into the future to meet this goal, even if this bill can make it out of committee. Under conditions in which the lifecycle of the organizations sustaining such goal is not long enough to achieve initiative completion, such goals need to survive long enough to be adopted by other existing or emerging organizations if initiative completion is to be attained. This includes surviving the pressure put on organizations to give attention to a different goal at the cost of attention given to the goal of interest, articulated in this framework as “shock events”.

Shock events are similar to the “External shocks”(Fernández-i-Marín, Hurka, Knill, & Steinebach, 2019) and “Stochastic shocks”(Baumgartner, Jones, & Mortensen, 2018) of the punctuated equilibrium literature, but are distinct in this framework in that they are not necessarily external or stochastic. Any event that puts pressure on organizations to give attention to one goal at the cost of another constitutes a shock event for the goal at risk of losing attention payed to it. By surviving shock events, goals can persist long enough to be viable for adoption by other organizations during windows of opportunity. Borrowing from Kingdon’s (1984) idea of windows of opportunity in which the policy, politics, and problems streams must be aligned for the opportunity for agenda change to emerge, a window of opportunity for the purposes of this framework is conceptualized as the marginal increase in a goal’s options for adoption following a shock event. The range of organizations available to adopt a goal is determined by the alignment of four key variables; these being both the (1) autonomy and (2) capacity of organizations to adopt goals as well as both (3) the interest/time horizon of decision makers within these organizations and (4) the extent to which they consider adopting the goal to be appropriate, each of which are influenced by the type of goal. The goal itself also determines the mechanism of goal adoption; be that copying the goal of another organization or transferring goals between organizations. To be successful, the goal must survive within organizations long enough to either repeat adoption by another organization or reach the point at which initiative completion is attained.

Unlike prior frameworks, which orient focus on actors and the interactions between them in various regimes, institutions, or ecologies of games, this framework shifts the focus to the goal itself, its survival depending on adoption mechanisms that are available and restricted by a variant of Kingdon’s (1984) windows of opportunity whereby the aforementioned shock events determine both opportunities that goals have to survive and the avenues available for their survival. For example, shock events producing skepticism towards the quality of public schools have provided the goal of educating current generations of students in the United States additional avenues for survival in the form of private organizations (Forman, 2007). Even within the public sector, shock events have recently provided avenues for organizations outside of the public school system to adopt the aforementioned goal. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in public libraries providing virtual classes to sustain the goal of educating current generations of students in the United States during the school closures that have resulted from the pandemic (Northfield Public Library, 2020). The adoption of this goal during the pandemic facilitates the ability of traditional educational organizations, notably schools, to overcome potential barriers to achieving this goal even though the Northfield Public Library may not necessarily maintain this goal in ways that allow for completion of the initiative, currently manifested in each generation’s graduation from various educational institutions. Yet, the extent to which actors at the Northfield library have been future-oriented enough to consider the long-term ramifications of children’s absence from school has allowed for a shift in time and energy towards providing online classes relative to the opportunity cost of doing so.

Consequential to this goal-centered analysis, this framework articulates goals themselves and the populations of goals that compete against each other for survival as the units of analysis in an ecology of goals by which competing goals, actors, organizations, and time frames act as the goal’s environment in an open system. The bird’s eye view of this framework can be understood as the following. Before the end of an organization’s lifecycle, goals must persist long enough, surviving shock events, to pass through a window of opportunity for adoption, which is defined by the availability of organizations available for goal adoption; itself determined by the goal, interest/time horizon of decision makers, appropriateness of goal adoption, autonomy of the organization to adopt, and the organization’s capacity to do so. The goal must then repeat this process prior to the end of its host’s organizational lifecycle or until initiative completion. If the goal misses windows of opportunity before the end of the lifecycle of the organizations that have adopted the goal, then the goal must depend on goal revival or copy from another goal copy in order to be successful. This framework is necessary as far as it illuminates the process by which practitioners sustain goals for initiatives that correspond to completion points that exist in points in time beyond the life cycle of the organization that the practitioner operates within.

Fig. 1 illustrates the process of inter-organizational goal transfer between three hypothetical organizations. The ovals represent the organizations themselves, with each end representing the birth and death of the organization. Within each organization exist decision makers with varying time horizons corresponding to the furthest point in time they are considering when making decisions; an example of three decision makers represented by A1, A2, and A3. Only A2 has a time horizon far enough into the future to consider the initiative corresponding to the realization of the goal being considered for adoption during the window of opportunity. The X-axis represents the passage of time, through which it can be observed that all three organizations contribute to goal sustainability and yet only the last organization exists long enough to see initiative completion.

Section snippets

Distinguishing individual from organizational goal adoption

Although organizations themselves may operate in ways such that they appear as automatons with their own interests and behaviors, organizations only operate to the extent that the individuals within them dedicate time and energy to doing so. For example, while the department of Housing and Urban Development’s official missions includes creating “…strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all” (HUD, 2020), this is only substantively the case as far as

Intra-organizational goal survival

Despite the fact that goals more far-reaching in time than the lifecycle of the organizations maintaining them have to succeed in being adopted by other organizations, they must first exist long enough in their host organizations to have an opportunity to do so. Goals that have deadlines at increasingly distant points in time may face a disadvantage as a result of decision maker’s discounting of the future (Slaughter, 1990). Experimental evidence shows that actors prioritize goals with shorter

Inter-organizational goal adoption

The successful completion of initiatives entailing goals that must be sustained beyond the lifecycle of any individual organization prior to goal completion requires adoption of such goals by other organizations. Within this framework, inter-organizational goal adoption is largely concerned with (1) the mode of adoption defining the process through which organizations adopt goals, (2) the windows of opportunity making organizations available for such adoption, and (3) the factors that determine

Peaks on the survived goals landscape

The landscape of goals that have survived occupation in organizations throughout recorded history concern both the goals that continue to be adopted by multiple organizations as well as those that have continued to be sustained by individual organizations. Barring territorial sovereignty, the sustainability of family and community life that tends to accompany it, and the use of bricks as a building material, perhaps one of the longest surviving goals that is adopted through goal copy is

Future directions & discussion

This proposed framework illuminates our understanding of interactions between goals, initiatives, intra-organizational goal survival, organizational lifecycles, and organizational structures. This framework also lays the foundation to investigate the causes and mechanics of goal adoption by articulating modes of inter-organizational adoption (notably goal copy, goal transfer, and goal revival), windows of opportunity, shock events, and the range of organizations available – determined by the

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Declaration of Competing Interest

None.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank James Thompson and Kate Albrecht for helpful comments in an earlier draft.

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