Creating Sustainable Culture for Sustainability

The rapidly changing environment in which organizations operate demands adequate and fast organizational response. Organizations answer such demand with new forms of organizing among those projects. Project management can be seen as a process tool to react on fast changing environment and to be efficient and competitive. But beyond what could be seen as the structure of the organizations, the major distinguishing feature of successful companies as well as one of the most powerful factors for their success is their organizational culture. Even if in research, there is still no unique definition of organizational culture, there is no disagreement about the importance of organizational culture and its roles for attaining organization coherence and performance. Culture can be seen as the strategic key of a competitive advantage. Beyond such consensus, research is still at its infancy when it comes to understand how to develop a sustainable organizational culture. The question becomes whether project management as a form of organization and a set of tools to implement change could in fact become a tool to develop a sustainable culture. This paper aims at exploring to what extent a sustainable organizational culture for sustainability could be a sustainable outcome of a sustainable project. This paper is largely based on a literature review where few examples are used to illustrate how Agile or Extreme Project Management approaches have been discussed and used as a relevant way to use project tools and techniques to create sustainable organizational culture. The paper also shows the centrality of project as an organizational pattern to develop sustainable culture of adaption and flexibility