(Photo by iStock/fermate)
As a doctoral student, Fannie Couture traveled to Sydney, Australia, to study how management strategy unfolds in complex situations. While searching for the right field site for her investigation, Couture was introduced to an organization that is dedicated to improving water health. The organization, a multi-stakeholder initiative based in Queensland, Australia, addresses deteriorating water quality in the region of the Great Barrier Reef, an ecologically important marine sanctuary that is home to the world’s largest collection of coral reefs.
Couture, now an assistant professor of management at HEC Montréal, has a new paper on the governance problems that the organization faced, cowritten with Paula Jarzabkowski, professor of strategic management at the University of Queensland Business School in Brisbane and the Bayes Business School at City University of London, and Jane K. Lê, professor of strategic management at the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Vallendar, Germany. Together, the researchers conducted an in-depth case study of the Australian organization, which they call “WaterHealthOrg.”
Established in the wake of floods that triggered an environmental disaster, WaterHealthOrg brought together scientists, water experts, nonprofits, scholars, consultants, agriculture and mining groups, and local and state authorities after hundreds of gigaliters of contaminated coal-mine water were discharged into a critical basin that flows to the Great Barrier Reef. Not only did aquatic flora and fauna suffer, but also drinking water was affected, with residents experiencing gastrointestinal distress. The incident sparked a crisis in trust as citizens demanded an explanation from the government. The creation of WaterHealthOrg attempted to address the problem, but years later, its impact on water quality has been minimal to nonexistent.
Taking a deep dive into the organization, the researchers collected data to disentangle its governance dynamics and internal tensions. They sought to understand what happens when organizations with different stakeholders confront a “grand challenge,” or a problem that is too multifaceted and complex to solve within the boundaries of one group or one government.
“We spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to solve problems and still have a very difficult time tackling those issues,” Couture says. “In the academic grand challenge literature, we’ve been studying organizations to try to understand why, and yet we don’t quite understand the mechanisms that hinder progress on these issues.”
Couture spent three months with WaterHealthOrg, observing meetings, attending events, interviewing community members, and following the launch of “report cards”—three- to four-page products prepared by the organization to publicly disclose information pertaining to water health in an easy-to-read map. The positive reception of the report cards by the community, the researchers found, gave the organization a false sense of having solved the problem. Focusing on external activities, including promoting the report cards and talking to media outlets, the organization neglected water health beyond putting a grade on it.
“We saw decoupling in collective efforts between developments that were externally and internally driven,” Couture says, “Sources of tension and hard decisions were neglected in favor of what made people happy.”
Digging into interviews and observational and archival data, the researchers identified three “governance traps,” or sources of failure at WaterHealthOrg. First was “the inclusion trap.” The literature on high-performance teams stresses the importance of members getting along, building trust, and feeling comfortable, but the paper’s analysis of WaterHealthOrg challenges this norm. Sustaining psychological safety undermined their efficiency and precluded friction that might have generated the creativity and innovation necessary to meet the challenge of improving water health in the Great Barrier region.
Second, an “external legitimacy trap” took hold as the organization prioritized securing external support at the expense of building capacity to address the problem it was designed to solve. Participants became skilled advocates for WaterHealthOrg and yet failed to mitigate water degradation. Finally, the organization, as a large-scale, yearslong collaboration, succumbed to a “standardization trap” as it gained recognition and a higher profile. Other local and national groups looked to it for leadership, and the organization sought comparability and replicability in its approach, quashing WaterHealthOrg’s ability to innovate and respond to a complex, evolving problem.
“Tackling grand sustainability challenges often requires disparate stakeholders to collaborate, and yet collaboration on such grand challenges is hard,” says Tima Bansal, professor of strategy at the University of Western Ontario’s Ivey Business School. “Even though the stakeholders wanted to act, the stakeholder governance challenges ultimately became intractable.”
Fannie Couture, Paula Jarzabkowski, and Jane Kirsten Lê, “Triggers, Traps, and Disconnect: How Governance Obstacles Hinder Progress on Grand Challenges,” Academy of Management Journal, forthcoming.
Read more stories by Daniela Blei.