Implementing a sustainability scorecard: the STARS model case study

Sustainability Scorecard

SU specifically gained support for implementing the STARS model by doing two things. The first was that the sustainability office contacted the top administrators before applying to be a pilot site. This step is important to initiating organizational change, but does not constitute best management practice. For any initiative to succeed, senior management buy-in is essential, but so is their vocal support (Mackenzie, n.d). The rest of the organization sees senior management commitment as a sign of an initiative's perceived worth to the organization. The sustainability department at SU received permission from senior management but the initiative did not have a senior management champion. This manifested in problems downstream, such as the lack of serious support from members of the faculty.

The second thing that SU did to gain support was to send e-mails to mid-level administrators to gain their support for the project. This was not good business practice. Email is an impersonal method of communication. While the concepts may be sufficiently complex as to warrant a text document, email is often unread, skimmed over or otherwise ignored. The sustainability office needed to conduct more personal outreach to the mid-level administrators in order to truly gain their support for the STARS initiative.

2. The most significant challenge that SU faced when implementing the STARS model was communicating the definitions of the terms, in particular conveying what sustainable actions looked like. Many faculty members and others in the university did not truly understand the concepts and definitions, and were therefore unable to perform any kind of accurate self-assessment of their sustainability initiatives. The balanced scorecard methodology, had it been used more effectively, could have addressed this issue. Each element of the scorecard is evaluated against objectives (BalancedScorecard.org, 2011). This would have provided a framework for faculty members to determine, for example, precisely what sustainability in their research work or teaching courses actually constituted.

Another key challenge for implementing the model was with respect to resource allocation. The amount of data needed for STARS was substantial and the university had no established way of gathering that information. This challenge will be alleviated over time, but the sustainability department only has nine people, so it may find meeting the requirements of STARS to be burdensome. In addition, some of the data required may be superfluous -- the STARS program is generic and some things may not apply to all universities.

3. SU's participation in the STARS pilot study is unlikely to add value to the institution. The pilot study is only a means of recording or measuring sustainability achievements. It has not fully integrated the concepts of the balanced scorecard. What the balanced scorecard is intended to do is to focus organizations on the activities and strategies that will allow them to achieve the best possible mix of outcomes in a number of areas. The STARS pilot study can, in theory, allow SU to incorporate sustainability initiatives into the balanced scorecard that it uses, which would also include a number of financial and academic metrics as well. Right now, the STARS pilot study is not sufficiently refined to offer this value, and has been poorly implemented by the university. Over time, STARS may evolve into a useful tool that can help SU craft better strategy. An example of an outcome that would flow from this might be to implement a sustainability initiative that also lowers the school's costs, thereby increasing its profits. Right now those linkages do not exist, but when the balanced scorecard is more fully implemented, including the Strategy Map, such outcomes may be possible. The pilot study is only the first step along that path, and of itself has little potential to add value to the organization.

4. One of the criticism's of the STARS model was that it did not award points in a manner that corresponded with the actual outcomes. This led to low-impact projects being rewarded in a manner equivalent to high-impact projects. In addition, the STARS model does not orient the university towards actual positive outcomes, but to STARS points. These are merely a proxy for the genuinely positive outcomes that are supposed to be at the heart of sustainability initiatives.

These problems lead one to the conclusion that the STARS program orients universities to the low-hanging fruit. Schools will seek to acquire STARS points in the most cost-effective way, and these points are awarded on a short-term basis. There is little in the STARS program that specifically orients schools towards long-term projects, especially if those projects may not pay environmental dividends right away according to the STARS point system.