By Miriam Lanzetta*
Organizations increasingly recognize the need to speak the language of sustainability. The United Nations Global Compact 2025 CEO Report found that 99% of surveyed CEOs intend to maintain or expand their sustainability commitments. Yet when those commitments enter the world of projects – the means through which organizations execute their strategy -, they often become harder to see.
They can fade between investment decisions, delivery pressures, competing priorities, and reporting deadlines. PMI’s Project Success Report 2025 highlights the consequence: only 4.3 percent of projects consider their environmental, social, and economic impacts.
This gap matters because projects are among the most powerful ways organizations shape society. They influence workplaces, communities, access to services, inclusion, stakeholder trust, and the distribution of risks and benefits. Their effects on people begin well before the final deliverable is produced and often continue long after formal closure.
The practical question for leaders is therefore how to make sustainability part of the way projects are selected, governed, and delivered.
The System Innovation Model for Sustainable Project Delivery we developed at Lascò – presented to the project management community at the PMI Global Summit Series in Lisbon at the end of April – proposes some answers, with practical ways to integrate environmental, social, and economic considerations throughout the project life cycle. For Diversity News readers, its most important message is simple: social sustainability – and therefore inclusion – must be designed into the way work is done.
Projects Always Affect People
Every project affects people. It may affect employees adapting to new ways of working, customers navigating a redesigned service, communities living near new infrastructure, suppliers facing new expectations, or citizens relying on digital public services.
It also affects groups whose needs are easily overlooked because they are not represented when key decisions are made.
These effects can be seen in access and inclusion, working conditions and well-being, fairness in service design, trust between organizations and communities, skills development and employability, and the longer-term social consequences of business decisions. In this sense, social impact is not peripheral to project performance. It is part of project value.
PMI standards already encourage this broader view. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) emphasizes value delivery, stakeholder engagement, systems thinking, and tailoring. These principles remind practitioners that successful delivery is not limited to scope, schedule, and cost. A project can meet traditional constraints and still fall short if it creates avoidable harm, excludes affected groups, or weakens trust.
Too often, however, social sustainability is considered late, managed reactively, or delegated to specialist functions without sufficient influence over project decisions. The results are familiar: stakeholder resistance that could have been anticipated, unintended consequences for vulnerable or underrepresented groups, technically compliant solutions that fail to meet community needs, and inclusion commitments that remain disconnected from implementation.
The issue often reflects delivery systems that were not designed to make sustainability visible, discussable, and actionable.
Sustainability Must Be Built Into the Delivery System
Sustainability needs to be embedded in the organizational mechanisms that shape project outcomes every day. That means integrating sustainability into investment and prioritization decisions, governance reviews, project design and planning, stakeholder engagement, reporting and performance measures, capability development, and lessons learned.
The purpose is to help decision-makers and teams ask better questions early enough to influence outcomes.
For the social dimension, those questions include:
Who may be positively or negatively affected by this project? Which perspectives are missing from current discussions? Could the proposed solution create barriers for some groups? What social risks may emerge during implementation or after transition? Are we measuring only delivery efficiency, or also the quality and durability of the value created?
Sustainability Integration Requires Systems Thinking
Projects operate in living systems. A project can solve one problem while unintentionally creating another. A delivery decision that appears efficient in the short term may generate social costs elsewhere. A process designed around the “average user” may unintentionally exclude people with different abilities, circumstances, or lived experiences.
A digital transformation may improve efficiency while making access harder for older users or people with limited digital literacy. A workplace redesign may support cost objectives while weakening belonging, accessibility, or employee well-being. A procurement choice may reduce direct costs while increasing pressure on labor conditions elsewhere in the value chain. An infrastructure investment may create significant public value while also triggering community tension if engagement begins only after key decisions are already fixed.
This is why organizations need systems thinking if they want to integrate sustainability into project delivery. Project teams need to understand interdependencies, ripple effects, and context.
Social, environmental, and economic impacts are interconnected. A change in one area often produces consequences in another. Organizations that adopt a systems view are better able to recognize trade-offs, surface risks earlier, and identify opportunities to create more inclusive and resilient outcomes.
From Stakeholder Management to Stakeholder Integration
One of the most important shifts organizations can make is moving beyond traditional stakeholder management toward genuine stakeholder integration.
In many projects, stakeholder engagement is still treated primarily as communication planning, periodic updates, or approval sequencing. These activities remain necessary, but they are not sufficient for sustainable delivery. Projects with meaningful social impact require the perspectives of affected groups to inform decisions, not simply receive them.
That may mean engaging communities before assumptions are locked in, involving human resources, sustainability, procurement, operations, and project delivery teams in shared reviews, or creating structured dialogue with employee representatives, civil society organizations, local institutions, and other relevant actors.
It also means gathering feedback throughout the life cycle, not only at closure, and ensuring that underrepresented perspectives are present in design conversations rather than addressed after problems appear.
The objective is not consultation for its own sake. It is better decision-making. Organizations make stronger choices when they hear signals early, understand trade-offs more clearly, and recognize impacts that would otherwise remain invisible.
Six Areas Organizations Should Strengthen
A systems approach to sustainable project delivery can be translated into six practical areas of organizational development.
First, governance and decision-making should make sustainability visible in how projects are approved, reviewed, and redirected. This includes the criteria used to evaluate trade-offs, the thresholds that trigger escalation, and the expectations applied when social risks are material.
Second, project activities should include repeatable practices that help teams identify sustainability considerations early. Depending on context, this may include needs assessments, co-design workshops, impact reviews, or pilot initiatives that test new approaches before scaling them.
Third, teams need practical tools. Organizations often make progress when they provide lightweight support such as impact prompts, stakeholder and community mapping, accessibility and inclusion checklists, sustainability canvases, and dashboards that track relevant social indicators alongside delivery performance.
Fourth, support services and guidance need to be clear and usable. Executives, project leaders, and delivery teams often require different forms of support. Leadership may need help aligning investment choices with sustainability commitments. Teams may need facilitation, templates, training, or guidance to assess social risks and inclusion implications. A productive model is for sustainability specialists and the function that governs project management practices, such as the PMO or equivalent, to work together to define a practical service offering for sustainable project management.
Fifth, stakeholder networks and community dialogue should be structured rather than improvised. Organizations benefit from building feedback loops, identifying internal champions, enabling knowledge exchange, and maintaining channels through which community insight can meaningfully inform project decisions.
Sixth, monitoring and improvement should extend beyond efficiency measures alone. It is important to review not only whether projects are delivered effectively, but whether the organization is becoming more capable of delivering them sustainably. This may involve tracking outcomes, gathering perception data, reviewing lessons learned, and assessing the gap between current practice and stated ESG or inclusion ambitions.
Practical Ways to Start
Most organizations do not need to redesign their entire project delivery model at once. Progress often begins with modest but deliberate changes.
One effective step is to add social-impact prompts to project initiation, prioritization, and stage-gate reviews. Even a short set of questions can help teams identify foreseeable social risks, inclusion concerns, and affected groups early enough to act.
Another is to create cross-functional review moments at points where decisions can still be influenced. Bringing together project delivery, sustainability, procurement, HR, operations, and community-facing functions often surfaces issues that no single function would identify alone.
Lessons learned processes can also be expanded. In addition to technical challenges and schedule variance, organizations can capture stakeholder tensions, accessibility gaps, workforce effects, community concerns, and practices that strengthened trust and participation.
Capability building is equally important. Social sustainability requires skills in systems thinking, facilitation, inclusive engagement, active listening, impact assessment, and navigating competing priorities. The PMI GPM® Sustainability Competence Standard can provide useful guidance because it defines the skills and performance criteria necessary for project managers and sustainability leaders to integrate sustainable and regenerative practices into project delivery.
Finally, organizations can benefit from reviewing how they define success. A project delivered on time and on budget may still underperform if it creates avoidable social harm or weakens trust among those it was meant to serve. A more mature definition of success includes the quality, inclusiveness, and durability of the value produced.
Sustainability Integration Must Be Designed
Lasting positive impact emerges when governance, processes, tools, capabilities, and stakeholder relationships are designed to support it.
Projects are interventions in systems made up of people, institutions, communities, and interdependencies. For organizations committed to diversity, inclusion, and sustainability, the challenge is no longer only to deliver projects successfully. It is to deliver them responsibly, inclusively, and in ways that create value that lasts.
This is where project delivery becomes more than execution. It becomes a meaningful lever for better outcomes for people, organizations, and society.
* Miriam Lanzetta: Head of International Projects at Lascò and Vice President for Organization at PMI Southern Italy, she specializes in European projects focused on digital transformation, sustainability, and innovation in education and training systems. She has coordinated international initiatives involving more than 100 organizations across 30 countries, including projects recognized as good practices by the United Nations Global Compact for their contribution to the SDGs. She has also contributed to analyses, tools and strategic recommendations for the European Commission aimed at strengthening education and training systems across EU regions for the twin
