How Could Sustainability and Sustainable Development be Understood based on a Stakeholder Needs Focus? A Preliminary Suggestion

Climate change is frequently discussed, especially in developed countries. Sweden is one of the leading countries for sustainable development. Even so, the public debate indicates that understanding of sustainability could be difficult. Most leading companies publish yearly sustainability reports. The Global Reporting Initiative standards are widely used as directives for reporting, but in spite of that, sustainability reports vary considerably in quality. There seems to be no agreed transparent structure on assessing company sustainability. The problem could be the lack of understanding of what sustainability and sustainable development mean at an operational level. One way of achieving improved sense-making could be by applying Quality Management principles by substituting customer needs focus with stakeholder needs focus. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on what organisational sustainability and sustainable development could and should be and how it could be assessed. Quality Management principles based on a customer needs focus are translated to stakeholder needs focus. The process management approach of the outside in combined with the Pareto principle is used to identify global stakeholders and stakeholder needs as a starting point for understanding and defining sustainability at an operational level. A maturity structure based on the stages of understanding, defining, measuring, communicating and leading change is used to organise the content. A preliminary matrix to support the work on sustainability and sustainable development is proposed. This study is an example of how Quality Management could support Sustainable Development.