The Myth of Sustainability: When People Become the Forgotten Resource

In our earlier reflection on urgency culture, we explored how mission-driven organizations can slowly get pulled into a faster pace, where always responding starts to feel like commitment and slowing down can feel like letting people down. Let’s continue diving deeper!

When everything feels urgent, long-term sustainability gets harder to protect

Nowadays most of us are aware of sustainable practices and environmental impact, there are frameworks for social accountability and there are reports designed to demonstrate responsibility outward. However, in many organizations, exhaustion is still treated as a private cost of doing meaningful work.

We are not questioning if sustainability matters, it does, what we are raising awareness today is whether our definition of sustainability is wide enough to include the people carrying the work.

Sustainability without the human layer

Burnout is often described informally as fatigue. The research by WHO ICD-11, is more precise and classifies burnout as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, and characterized by emotional exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism towards one’s job as well as reduced professional efficacy. Burnout has measurable cognitive implications.

Burnout is often talked about as tiredness, but many people recognize it first somewhere else. For example in the moment when focus slips more easily, In that mental fog that makes simple tasks feel heavier than they should or when we have the sensation that the mind is working, but not with the same clarity or steadiness as before. Deligkaris et al. (2014) found that burnout is linked to difficulties with attention, working memory, and executive function, giving language to something many people already know from experience.

Other research also suggest that these effects can stay with people for quite some time. Österberg et al. (2015) found that concentration problems and reduced mental stamina can last for months, and sometimes longer than a year, especially when the wider conditions of work do not change. Burnout has also been associated with depression and cardiovascular disease (Salvagioni et al., 2017). It is not just a bad week or a temporary loss of motivation but a longer strain on the body and mind, and it tends to ask for more than rest alone. This is very important to consider when working in an organization, because when long term stress narrows attention and reduces executive functioning, strategic thinking suffers, decision-making becomes more reactive, risk assessment shifts and innovation becomes short-term.

An organization operating in chronic exhaustion does not simply have tired staff. It has reduced cognitive bandwidth at a structural level. We would not describe an overexploited natural resource as sustainable simply because output remains high. The same logic applies here.

Rewarding speed at what cost?

Part of the reason human depletion escapes scrutiny is that it mirrors the wider environment we operate in, because working nowadays is rarely stable. For someone working in an NGO a typical working day could Look like this: Starting the day with one clear plan, only to find that priorities have already changed by mid-morning. While working on the new changed priorities, a funder request comes in earlier than expected and a partner needs materials urgently, a task which was not agreed beforehand, the worker find themselves multitasking. Meanwhile messages keep arriving across email, WhatsApp, and Teams, leaving little space between tasks. The natural pauses that once gave shape to the working day start to disappear for this person. In that kind of environment, adaptability does not feel like a strength and instead, feels like the minimum needed just to keep up.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described our era as one of “liquid modernity”, a condition in which structures no longer hold their shape for long, and individuals are expected to remain flexible at all times, In such an environment, constant adjustment becomes the new normal. Inside organizations, this translates into a quiet cultural rule: responsiveness equals competence so, the faster we adjust, the more responsible we appear.

Another theorist called Paul Virilio, anticipated what shapes our working reality nowadays by reflecting on the social consequences of speed. He warned us that acceleration does not simply increase efficiency but It reshapes perception, compresses reflection, and alters the conditions under which decisions are made. When speed starts to shape how a system works, human limits do not go away. People simply carry the cost. For mission-driven organizations, the effect is amplified because the issues are (or perceived?) urgent, the needs are (or perceived?) immediate and the pressure to demonstrate impact is continuous.

Over time, the pace embeds itself so deeply that it becomes invisible and exhaustion stops signaling misalignment and instead is normalized, and when something feels normal, it is rarely questioned.

Expanding the definition of sustainability: humans as a resource

We have become increasingly skilled at identifying greenwashing, we often read our labels in the supermarket and we expect transparency in environmental claims. When there is ecological harm, we call for accountability, but we rarely apply the same scrutiny to human depletion.

What would it mean to include cognitive load, recovery time and psychological safety in sustainability thinking? What if human capacity were treated as part of organizational infrastructure rather than as a flexible input? Human sustainability is not a separate initiative, in fact it is the condition that makes every other commitment viable. If the people inside the system cannot remain well enough to carry the mission forward over years, the sustainability conversation remains incomplete. It is a lie.

A structural question

Sustainability cannot remain an external metric while internal depletion goes unexamined, therefore, organizations that exist to support communities are also responsible for sustaining the human systems within their own walls. Human sustainability does not come from adding a wellbeing programme on top of an already stretched system. It comes from:

• How the work is built in the first place
• How work is organized
• Whether people have space to recover.
• How much mental load they are carrying.
• Who decides the pace, and whether that pace is realistic.

For organisations seeking sustained contribution, the challenge is not only to move quickly when necessary, but to design systems that allow people to remain capable, clear-minded and committed over time. Sustainability, in its fullest sense, asks whether the work can continue without quietly eroding the people doing it.

HOW UUDLY CAN HELP?

We create solutions with workers and community members in mind. That might mean a rebrand shaped around staff capacity and technical realities, or a tailored website built from the actual needs of a complex organisation and its stakeholders. Our focus is not on surface-level change or performative improvement. We aim to create work that is useful, durable, and grounded in how the organisation actually functions.

If this resonates with where your organization is right now, we’d be glad to hear from you.

Download our worksheet and start building more sustainable ways of working.

References

World Health Organization (2019). ICD-11: Burnout as an occupational phenomenon.

Deligkaris, P., Panagopoulou, E., Montgomery, A. J., & Masoura, E. (2014). Job burnout and cognitive functioning: A systematic review. Work & Stress.

Österberg, K., Karlson, B., & Hansen, Å. M. (2009) Cognitive performance in patients with burnout, in relation to diurnal salivary cortisol

Salvagioni, D. A. J., et al. (2017). Physical, psychological and occupational consequences of job burnout: A systematic review. PLOS ONE.