Restructuring for Justice: How Seattle's Office of Sustainability & Environment Aligned Operations with Mission
- Kyla Marcelo
- Nov 19, 2025
- 8 min read
Updated: Nov 25, 2025
Executive Summary
Government agencies working on climate and environmental justice face a unique challenge: their missions demand innovation, equity, and cross-sector collaboration, but their structures often reflect outdated organizational models that hinder this work. Seattle's Office of Sustainability & Environment (OSE) recognized that to effectively advance climate justice for communities most impacted by inequity, they needed to fundamentally examine and transform their internal culture, structure, and collaboration practices. LRDG conducted a comprehensive, multi-phase organizational assessment that engaged staff at every level, resulting in a strategic vision and restructuring roadmap that positioned OSE to operate with greater alignment, clarity, and impact.
The Challenge
OSE carried a critical mission—advancing environmental sustainability and climate justice in Seattle, with particular focus on communities disproportionately affected by environmental harm and climate change. However, the office faced significant internal challenges that limited its ability to fulfill this mission effectively.
Culture-Mission Misalignment: OSE's organizational culture didn't fully reflect the climate justice values central to its mission. For an office committed to equity and justice externally, internal culture needed to embody those same principles in how staff were treated, how decisions were made, and whose voices were centered.
Structural Barriers: The office's organizational structure had evolved organically over time rather than being intentionally designed to support climate justice work. This created silos, unclear reporting relationships, inefficient workflows, and structural barriers to the kind of integrated, cross-cutting work climate justice demands.
Fragmented Collaboration: Teams within OSE worked largely independently, with limited cross-team collaboration or coordination. Climate and environmental justice issues don't respect departmental boundaries, yet OSE's structure reinforced those boundaries rather than facilitating integration.
Role and Responsibility Ambiguity: Staff lacked shared understanding of organizational roles, team dynamics, and who was responsible for what. This ambiguity created duplicated effort in some areas, gaps in others, and frequent confusion about decision-making authority and accountability.
Process Inefficiencies: Internal processes for planning, decision-making, communication, and coordination weren't serving the organization well. Unclear or cumbersome processes slowed work, created frustration, and prevented OSE from being as responsive and effective as its mission demanded.
Absence of Long-Term Vision: OSE lacked a clear, shared 3-5 year strategic vision. Without this north star, teams made decisions based on immediate priorities without understanding how their work fit into longer-term organizational direction.
No Roadmap for Change: While many staff recognized that change was needed, there was no structured assessment of what needed to change or roadmap for how to achieve transformation. Change efforts risked being fragmented, reactive, or unsustainable without strategic planning.
Staff Voice and Engagement: Decisions about organizational structure and culture were often made without sufficient input from staff who were doing the day-to-day work and could offer crucial insights about what was and wasn't working.
Impact on Communities: These internal challenges had external consequences. When an organization struggles with internal alignment, that struggle affects the quality and equity of services delivered to communities—particularly communities already marginalized and underserved.
The fundamental challenge was: How could OSE transform its culture, structure, and practices to align with its climate justice mission, while ensuring staff voices shaped that transformation and creating sustainable change rather than temporary fixes?
The Solution
LRDG designed and implemented a comprehensive, multi-phase organizational assessment and strategic planning process that engaged staff deeply and produced actionable roadmaps for transformation.
Phase 1: Comprehensive Organizational Assessment
LRDG began with extensive data gathering using multiple methods to ensure diverse staff voices were heard and multiple perspectives captured.
Staff-Wide Surveys: Anonymous surveys reached all OSE staff, gathering quantitative and qualitative data about experiences with organizational culture, structure, collaboration, processes, and leadership. Surveys provided baseline data and identified patterns across the organization.
Focus Groups: LRDG facilitated focus groups that allowed staff to discuss challenges and opportunities in depth. These sessions created space for nuanced conversation that surveys alone couldn't capture, revealing the stories behind the data.
Individual Interviews: One-on-one interviews with key stakeholders provided confidential space for candid observations, particularly on sensitive topics or individual experiences that staff might not share in group settings.
Team Retreats: LRDG facilitated retreats with different teams, creating dedicated time for reflection on team dynamics, challenges, and aspirations. These retreats built relationships while gathering important data about team-level needs.
Journey-Mapping Sessions: Staff participated in journey-mapping exercises that documented current workflows, decision-making processes, and collaboration patterns. This visual mapping revealed bottlenecks, gaps, and opportunities for improvement that traditional discussion might have missed.
Phase 2: Analysis and Recommendation Development
With rich data from multiple sources, LRDG conducted comprehensive analysis to identify themes, patterns, and priorities.
Cultural Assessment: Analysis examined OSE's current culture, how it aligned (or didn't) with climate justice values, and what cultural shifts would support the mission more effectively.
Structural Analysis: LRDG assessed organizational structure, identifying how current arrangements helped or hindered effective work and what structural changes could improve function and alignment.
Collaboration Pattern Mapping: Analysis revealed how teams currently collaborated (or didn't), where silos existed, and what would enable more effective cross-team coordination.
Process Evaluation: Internal processes were evaluated for efficiency, clarity, and equity—identifying which needed redesign or elimination.
Staff Voice Integration: Throughout analysis, LRDG ensured that staff perspectives and experiences were centered, not filtered through management assumptions. Recommendations reflected what staff themselves identified as needs and priorities.
Comprehensive Recommendations Report: LRDG compiled findings into a detailed report with specific, actionable recommendations across multiple domains:
Cultural shifts needed to align with climate justice values
Structural changes to improve function and break down silos
Enhanced cross-team collaboration mechanisms
Process improvements for planning, decision-making, and communication
Leadership and management practice changes
Staff development and support needs
Phase 3: Strategic Vision and Implementation Planning
The final phase translated assessment findings and recommendations into forward-looking strategic direction and concrete implementation pathways.
3-5 Year Strategic Vision Development: Working with OSE leadership and staff, LRDG facilitated development of a cohesive strategic vision that:
Articulated where OSE aspired to be in 3-5 years
Aligned organizational direction with climate justice mission
Created shared understanding of priorities and direction
Provided a north star for decision-making and resource allocation
Organizational Restructuring Roadmap: LRDG developed a detailed roadmap for organizational restructuring that:
Outlined specific structural changes recommended
Sequenced changes to manage complexity and maintain stability
Identified dependencies and prerequisites for different changes
Addressed how to transition from current to future structure
Considered change management needs and staff impact
Implementation Plan: The roadmap was accompanied by concrete implementation planning that specified:
Timelines and milestones for different initiatives
Roles and responsibilities for leading implementation
Resources required (time, budget, expertise)
Success metrics for tracking progress
Risk mitigation strategies
Communication plans for keeping staff informed and engaged
Sustainability Mechanisms: LRDG ensured the implementation plan included mechanisms for sustaining changes over time, not just achieving initial transformation—addressing how new structures, processes, and cultural norms would be reinforced and maintained.
The Impact
Through this comprehensive, multi-phase process, OSE gained essential clarity, direction, and tools for organizational transformation aligned with its climate justice mission.
Staff-Informed Understanding: The extensive assessment process gave OSE leadership deep, staff-informed understanding of organizational challenges and opportunities. Rather than operating from assumptions, leadership had data about lived staff experiences.
Cultural Clarity: OSE gained explicit understanding of how current culture aligned or conflicted with climate justice values and what cultural shifts were needed, moving from vague discomfort to concrete direction.
Structural Roadmap: Instead of continuing with an organically evolved structure that didn't serve the mission, OSE received a detailed roadmap for intentional restructuring that would better support climate justice work.
Enhanced Collaboration Framework: Recommendations and implementation plans included specific mechanisms for improving cross-team collaboration, breaking down silos that had limited OSE's integrated approach to climate justice.
Process Improvements: Clear identification of process inefficiencies and recommendations for improvement positioned OSE to operate more effectively, reducing frustration and freeing capacity for mission-critical work.
Shared Strategic Vision: For the first time, OSE had a cohesive 3-5 year strategic vision that provided direction, aligned teams, and created basis for coordinated action toward shared goals.
Actionable Implementation Path: Rather than aspirational recommendations without clear next steps, OSE received detailed implementation plans that translated vision into concrete, sequenced actions.
Staff Engagement and Buy-In: By centering staff voices throughout the process, LRDG built staff engagement with and ownership of proposed changes. Staff weren't being told what would change—they had shaped those changes.
Change Management Capacity: The process itself built OSE's capacity for managing organizational change, providing experience and frameworks that would serve future transformation efforts.
Mission Alignment: All recommendations and plans explicitly connected back to OSE's climate justice mission, ensuring that organizational changes would strengthen—not distract from—the office's core purpose of serving communities most impacted by environmental inequity.
Foundation for Climate Justice Impact: By addressing internal culture, structure, and collaboration challenges, OSE positioned itself to deliver more effective, equitable climate justice work for Seattle communities.
Critical Lessons Learned
OSE's organizational transformation journey offers important insights for government agencies and organizations working on climate justice and environmental equity:
Internal alignment enables external impact. Organizations cannot effectively advance justice externally if their internal operations don't reflect those values. OSE's willingness to examine internal culture and structure was prerequisite for enhanced climate justice work.
Comprehensive assessment reveals interconnected challenges. Using multiple assessment methods—surveys, focus groups, interviews, retreats, journey-mapping—captured complexity that any single method would have missed.
Staff voice is essential expertise. Staff doing the day-to-day work have crucial insights about what does and doesn't work. Centering their voices in assessment and planning creates both better solutions and greater buy-in.
Structure and culture are intertwined. OSE's assessment addressed both organizational structure and culture because changing one without the other creates misalignment. Comprehensive transformation requires addressing both.
Strategic vision provides necessary direction. Without clear 3-5 year vision, organizations make fragmented decisions based on immediate pressures. Strategic vision creates coherence and purpose.
Change requires detailed implementation planning. Many organizational change efforts fail not because recommendations are wrong but because implementation isn't planned thoroughly. Detailed roadmaps and implementation plans translate vision into reality.
Phased approach manages complexity. Breaking the work into distinct phases—assessment, analysis and recommendations, strategic vision and implementation planning—made a complex transformation project manageable.
Climate justice demands organizational innovation. Traditional government structures often weren't designed for the kind of integrated, equity-centered, cross-cutting work climate justice requires. Transformation, not just incremental improvement, may be necessary.
Change takes time and sustained commitment. The multi-phase process acknowledged that meaningful organizational transformation isn't quick. OSE's willingness to invest time and resources reflected appropriate commitment to the depth of change needed.
Looking Forward
Seattle's Office of Sustainability & Environment embarked on a courageous journey—examining itself honestly and committing to transformation in service of its climate justice mission. The comprehensive assessment, strategic vision, and implementation roadmap LRDG provided position OSE to operate with greater internal alignment, clearer direction, and enhanced capacity to serve communities most impacted by environmental inequity and climate change.
The work of organizational transformation is ongoing. OSE now has the analysis, recommendations, vision, and implementation plans necessary to guide that journey. Success will require sustained leadership commitment, continued staff engagement, patience with the inevitable challenges of change, and flexibility to adapt as implementation reveals new insights.
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