When no single organisation controls the system, transformation has to be built through meaning, relationships and evidence rather than hierarchy alone.
A chief executive can issue a policy internally. A regulator can impose a requirement. A contract can specify an obligation. None of those mechanisms is sufficient on its own when a sustainability outcome depends on farmers, suppliers, processors, customers, financiers, government, communities and knowledge partners changing together.
This is the defining challenge of cross-enterprise transformation: authority is fragmented while the outcome is interdependent.
The natural management response is to create governance structures, KPIs, standards and contracts. Those mechanisms matter. But longitudinal evidence from sustainable supply-chain collaboration suggests that formal mechanisms often arrive after a more difficult process has begun: participants must first learn what the ambition means in their own context and whether they trust one another enough to act.
The Strategic Context
Van der Heijden and Cramer's 2017 study followed a Dutch sustainable pig-farming initiative over 17 years. The researchers examined change agents through a sensemaking lens focused on communication, action and relationship building.
The case evolved rather than following a fixed master plan. Change agents translated an abstract sustainability ambition into language relevant to partners, improved transparency, participated in certification, experimented with new ideas, expanded partnerships and progressively built a broader network around the supply chain.
The study's conclusion is important: embedding sustainability was a social process in which meaning became local through interaction. The change agents adapted their approach as sector conditions and expectations changed. Informal personal relationships remained significant even as more formal structures developed.
This is not evidence that governance is unnecessary. It is evidence that governance cannot substitute for sensemaking where the problem itself is still being interpreted.
What Leaders Commonly Misread
The first misreading is that alignment can be communicated into existence. Sending the same message to every participant does not create shared meaning if each participant experiences different incentives, risks and constraints.
The second is that collaboration can be designed fully in advance. In emergent transformation, some of the required partners, technologies and workable compromises are discovered through action.
The third is that formal contracts create trust. Contracts can clarify obligations and reduce ambiguity, but they do not automatically create the relational capital required to solve novel problems across organisational boundaries.
The fourth is to romanticise change agents as heroic individuals. The Dutch case shows the value of central actors, but relying on one person creates fragility. The organisational challenge is to institutionalise the network, knowledge and routines without destroying the adaptive relationships that made change possible.
Reframing the Issue
Traditional change management often assumes a reasonably identifiable future state within an organisation that possesses authority over employees and processes.
Cross-enterprise sustainability transformation is different. Participants may disagree about the problem, bear different costs, capture different benefits and answer to different governance systems.
The leadership problem therefore becomes:
How do we create enough shared meaning and reciprocal value for independent actors to coordinate voluntarily, while progressively formalising what proves effective?
This is closer to ecosystem leadership than command-and-control change.
Sensemaking Has Three Practical Components
Communicate in the language of the participant
The research describes change agents translating sustainability into understandable language for potential partners. This is more than simplifying a message. It means connecting the ambition to the partner's operating reality.
A supplier may need to understand process stability and margin. A customer may care about provenance and quality. Government may focus on externalities and compliance. A financier may care about risk. The shared ambition must be coherent enough to unite them without pretending their interests are identical.
Act before everything is known
Experimentation was central to the longitudinal case. Trial and error revealed opportunities and helped participants refine what sustainability meant in practice.
For leaders, the important distinction is between reckless action and structured experimentation. A pilot can create evidence, reduce ambiguity and build credibility without committing the whole network prematurely.
Build relationships before the crisis
Informal interactions, personal contacts and trust-based relationships helped the change agents fine-tune expectations and coordination. These mechanisms matter because novel problems rarely fit perfectly inside contractual interfaces.
Formal governance becomes stronger when it rests on relationships capable of handling exceptions, not when it attempts to remove the need for relationships altogether.
The Role of the Change Agent
The study portrays change agents as translators, network builders, experimenters and political entrepreneurs. Their influence did not come from owning the entire chain.
That role is especially relevant in programs involving suppliers, industry bodies, regulators and community stakeholders. The change agent creates movement by connecting actors who control different parts of the solution.
But the role should mature over time.
Early in the transformation, the change agent may rely heavily on personal credibility and informal coordination. As the network stabilises, knowledge should be distributed, decision rights clarified, metrics agreed and repeatable routines embedded. The objective is not to eliminate the change agent but to prevent the system from collapsing when the individual steps away.
Van der Heijden and Cramer observed loss of focus when change-agent involvement was interrupted. That is a warning for executive sponsors: relational dependence is a transition risk.
Decision Framework
Leaders can assess cross-enterprise collaboration through five questions.
1. Shared ambition
Can participants explain the common outcome in terms that matter to their own organisation?
2. Reciprocal value
Does each critical participant have a credible reason to remain involved, even if benefits differ?
3. Evidence pathway
What experiments or early results will turn abstract ambition into credible evidence?
4. Relationship architecture
Which interfaces require formal contracts, which require working relationships, and where are both necessary?
5. Institutionalisation
How will knowledge, routines and governance survive beyond the individuals who initiated the change?
A network that scores poorly on one of these dimensions may still progress, but the weakness should be treated as a design issue rather than a communication problem.
From Strategy to Execution
Immediate action is to identify the actors without whom the outcome cannot be achieved and map what each one believes the problem to be. Do not start with a generic stakeholder communication plan. Start with differences in interpretation, value and constraint.
Medium-term capability building means creating repeated forums where evidence changes the shared understanding. Pilot reviews, joint problem-solving sessions, supplier innovation workshops and cross-organisational data transparency can become mechanisms for sensemaking if they are designed around real decisions.
Formalise only what has earned enough stability to benefit from standardisation. Premature governance can freeze a weak model. Too little governance leaves the network dependent on personal goodwill. The timing of formalisation is itself a leadership judgement.
Long-term positioning requires building ecosystem capability. Organisations that repeatedly work across suppliers, regulators, customers and partners should treat network orchestration as a strategic competence. That includes negotiation, boundary-spanning roles, shared measurement, conflict resolution and the ability to run controlled experiments across organisational interfaces.
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Signals to Monitor
Watch for participants repeating the same sustainability language while making decisions that reveal different interpretations. Verbal agreement can conceal operational misalignment.
Monitor whether experiments are generating learning or simply producing demonstrations. A pilot that cannot change the program's assumptions is theatre, not sensemaking.
Track concentration of relational knowledge. If one person holds most cross-organisational trust and tacit knowledge, succession and continuity risk are high.
Also monitor whether formal governance is expanding faster than shared value. Growing numbers of committees, reports and requirements can create the appearance of collaboration while participants quietly disengage.
Questions for the Leadership Team
- Do our critical partners share the ambition, or merely recognise the terminology?
- What does each participant gain, risk or sacrifice by supporting the change?
- Which assumption should we test together before formalising the next stage?
- Where are personal relationships compensating for weak governance, and where is governance compensating for weak trust?
- What knowledge would disappear if the principal change agent left tomorrow?
- How will we know when an experimental practice is mature enough to standardise?
Closing Perspective
Cross-enterprise transformation cannot be cascaded through a hierarchy that does not exist.
It must be constructed through repeated interpretation, action, evidence and relationship building, then progressively converted into governance that can survive beyond its founders.
The practical implication is demanding but useful: when collaboration stalls, the answer may not be another policy, KPI or steering committee. The system may still lack a shared understanding of what the change means, why each participant should care, and what evidence would make the next commitment rational.
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