The complexity of the cuvée organization does not allow us to cover all aspects of its hypothetical operations. Therefore, it is necessary to zoom into a micro-level application where we can focus on one specific perspective of its functioning to test its suitability to sustainability. Hence, we now turn our attention to behavioral economics when introducing the hypothetical organizational form of the cuvée organization as we agree with scholars who say that it is no longer the lack of knowledge that stops us from acting consciously towards our social and ecological environment but certain attributes of human behavior that makes this endeavor difficult ^[4][5][36,37]. Behavioral economics covers a vast field of psychological phenomena like diverse types of heuristics and biases, affect, and emotions. For the sake of our argumentation in this paper, to investigate how the cuvée organization might differ from currently known mainstream economic actors in their decision making, it is sufficient for us to focus on one dimension of behavioral economics. Our choice fell on the phenomena of discounting because it poses a serious threat to tackling sustainability challenges and currently constitutes an inherent part of the business environment and acts as a serious barrier to change. After a short introduction to the relationship of discounting and sustainability issues, we will introduce those proposed traits of the cuvée organization that may enable it to counterbalance the innate emergence of discounting in their decision-making processes. This should serve as an example of a micro-level application of the concept of cuvée organization.

However, as we venture into the domains of behavioral decision making, it is important to make our stance explicit with regard to the conceptual choices we make in this paper. When it comes to our interpretation of behavioral decision making, our conceptual choice lies with ecological rationality. Ecological rationality supposes that behaviors contradicting the axioms of rationality may still result in successful and accurate decisions. Thus, heuristics and biases—understood as systematic violations of the rational choice theory—should not necessarily have a negative connotation. The rationality of behavior is contextualized; it is contingent on the circumstances of the decision, or as Herbert Simon suggests, on the “structure of task environments” ^[6][38] (p. 7). In Simon’s pair of scissors analogy, the two blades of cognition—the computational capabilities of the individual—and the context both play a role. The ecologically rational choice is a “match between mind and environment” ^[7][39] (p. xix), and this match can be served well with fast and frugal heuristics requiring less time, information, and computation without compromising accuracy.

Any organization aiming for sustainability has the significant challenge of solving current challenges while maintaining a long-term perspective and aiming for resilience both internally and in their environment. When examining firms with contractual relationship between the top management and the shareholders and comparing them to family-owned businesses, Sanjay and Pramodita Sharma ^[17][52] found that ownership is an important aspect of patience in return on investments. Even though both types of organizations’ strategic decisions are based on the owners’ goals and perspectives, when relational ownership and management apply, these decisions have longer time horizons. When creating value for current stakeholders, it is important to balance them out for values of future stakeholders even if these may change in the meantime. However, this often requires long-term investments called patient capital ^[17][52]. While patient capital can also be used for malign as well as benign purposes, in our case its sheer existence is crucial in running a cuvée organization whose decision making is supposed to be long-term. Patient capital comes from investors who for various reasons are willing to invest in the long-term, often with the intention to protect certain stakeholders’ interests or secure ownership over longer periods of time. The literature on patient capital ^[18][19][20][53,54,55] focuses on financial returns on investments in the long-term, the participants in the backcasting research intuitively focused on the role of ownership and investor responsibility. Many backcasting interventions that lead to the rise of a cuvée organization deal with these two perspectives. The resulting systems map shows that participants presumed that a higher level of investor responsibility would decrease the “rate of money-generating function of money” as they called it and hence lead to the strengthening of the cause-driven approaches necessary for the penetration of cuvée organizations in the economic sphere. Urging capital to look for high socioecological return instead of high, short-term financial return on investments was deemed a prerequisite for the rise of cuvée organizations. Even though ownership was discussed as a separate issue, in the patient capital literature the two concepts interrelate. In the backcasting research, employee ownership was seen as a tool to enhance participation in strategic decision making and the representation of diverse stakeholder interests. Through these correlations, however, this proves to be also a tool to fight short-termism and discounting.

3. Conclusions

Herein aimed to inspire the ongoing scientific discourse on the role and responsibility of business organizations in a sustainability transition with a thought-provoking hypothetical concept coming from a backcasting research conducted with an expert panel. By introducing the normative concept of cuvée organization stemming from our qualitative research, we aspired to broaden scientific understanding on how the meta-characteristics of economic organizations such as their motivation, worldview, systems view, relationship to other organizations, society as a whole, their employees and other stakeholders lead to sustainability. Testing this concept to sustainability in general would have been too broad to handle, hence we used one particular perspective of sustainable decision making, namely fighting discounting as a micro-level application of these meta-characteristics. In addition, we believe that the winemaking metaphor is of great help in comprehending the details of the necessary changes in the behavior of economic actors when seeking sustainability.

Cuvée organizations are economic actors that act as strongly embedded nodes in not just economic but also social and ecological networks with a purpose to serve a particular cause important to the whole of that network. This worldview of embeddedness, relatedness, and cause drivenness puts a natural limit to the atomistic, self-centered view of profit maximization and induces coopetition instead of competition when working towards a cause. When applying these meta-characteristics to a specific area, namely fighting discounting in a process of sustainable decision making, our findings show that even without a detailed focus on counterbalancing discounting, participants intuitively based their understanding of the ideal future organization on traits that are supposed to challenge our affinity to discount. These include, for example, decentralized decision making with the involvement of a wide range of stakeholders; extensive use of employee ownership; coopetition and networking; open-source knowledge sharing; and intensive trust building through transparency. Testing the meta-characteristics of the cuvée organization on a micro-level application showed how even in just hypothetical settings, these characteristics matter in everyday decision making that serves sustainability.