Aarhus Vand Strategy 2025
Aarhus Vand’s business strategy towards 2025 builds on its 2020 strategy, which over more than a decade positioned the company as one of Denmark’s absolute leaders in the water sector. Building this foundation creates even greater opportunities to shape the water utility of the future.
Strategy 2025 is based on the premise that the global water sector faces major challenges – and opportunities – in the coming years. A wide range of factors, particularly climate change, with too little water in some places and too much in others, could radically reshape the market.
At the same time, Aarhus Vand is preparing for significant investments in the coming years – especially the establishment of a new resource plant, Aarhus ReWater, which by 2028 will replace the Marselisborg, Åby, and Viby wastewater treatment plants.
In developing the strategy, we therefore explored four long-term scenarios that have helped us navigate a complex market which may evolve in very different directions.
Implementation Process: Strategy 2025
To identify and qualify the direction of the organization, mapping the gap between the current and the desired future state was central. The process involved analyzing terms of the competencies and culture required to realize Aarhus Vand’s Strategy 2025.
The development activities and working method were designed to ensure a needs-driven (pull-thinking) and practice-oriented approach, creating progress close to the core business and everyday operations. This was done through concrete development activities, each containing a full learning loop: problem analysis, goal setting, development activities, and anchoring.
Evaluation and anchoring ensure clarity on which development activities create real impact and behavioral change in order to implement Strategy 2025 at Aarhus Vand. In practice, this means that leaders and employees continuously work with concrete everyday actions that bring them one step closer to implementing Strategy 2025 and creating valuable results for Aarhus Vand.
Principles for Implementing Strategy 2025
Principle 1 – Agile Organization and Culture
The concepts of “direction, alignment, and commitment” (DAC) reflect Aarhus Vand’s familiarity with a process-oriented understanding of leadership. This mindset is essential to embed the culture, behavior, and ways of thinking in order to succeed in an increasingly complex and changing world.
The next development step for Aarhus Vand was to move beyond understanding DAC thinking and agile principles, organizational forms, and leadership models – to truly embedding them in behavior, mindset, and culture. In practice, this principle is expressed in the implementation process of Strategy 2025, where emphasis is placed on creating learning journeys rooted in practice-driven pull-thinking that supports the transformation in the daily work of leaders and employees.
In an agile organization, purpose provides the meaningful direction that seamlessly binds the organization together through coordination and commitment – across silos, functions, professions, and roles, whether as leaders or employees. Leadership’s task is to set the team – but also to let go (at least partially) of control and, through leadership, show a direction that enables action.
Principle 2 – Sustainable Development
Sustainable development is a central guiding principle in Strategy 2025 and, inspired by the UN Sustainable Development Goals, is incorporated into Aarhus Vand’s Code of Conduct. The next step for Aarhus Vand was to support leaders and employees in driving a cultural transformation of the organization’s mindset and behavior – from an industrial mindset and behavior (short-term economic growth, efficiency, and competition) to a sustainable mindset and behavior (understanding the world as an ecological, interdependent whole, and adopting a concept of growth where the economic bottom line is integrated with social and environmental bottom lines).
Principle 3 – Digital Transformation
Leading digital transformation is a critical leadership competence for the success of Strategy 2025. Digitalization impacts every aspect of the core business, and it can no longer be left solely to the IT department. Digital transformation is a leadership responsibility, and leaders must be equipped to drive it, perform, and adapt in an environment shaped by new opportunities, new expectations, and new challenges. This requires developing a digital mindset and the competencies needed to foster digital innovation.
Digitalization transforms both the core business and the relationship with customers and employees. For this reason, leadership and organizational development initiatives at Aarhus Vand should equip leaders and employees with the competencies and the courage to actively co-create this future – rather than becoming passive recipients of change.
About Aarhus Vand
Aarhus Vand is one of the most fundamental sources of health for people, the city, nature, and the sea. The need for clean water is universal – everywhere, always. Today, clean water is a scarce resource, but if managed responsibly, it holds infinite potential to create a future of well-being and life – both globally and locally.
The history of Aarhus Vand began at the well in Store Torv in Aarhus, where the city’s water source was contaminated by wastewater, triggering a deadly cholera outbreak. This catastrophe led to the establishment of Aarhus Water Supply in 1872, paving the way for safeguarding the foundation of a healthy life.
Since then, Aarhus Vand has shaped a sustainable water cycle in Aarhus – one that today serves as international inspiration. With the water cycle at the center, we are rethinking how the potential of water can be realized to benefit the climate and bring value to us all.
Through ingenuity and committed partnerships, Aarhus Vand works every day to deliver innovative solutions that future-proof a balanced water cycle – as the framework for healthy living and biodiversity in nature. Aarhus Vand creates health through clean water – for people and for the planet.
Contact us to learn more about what we can do for your organization
Are you facing organizational change? Do you need strategic advice or a cultural development program?
Contact us so we can tailor a program that develops exactly those competencies and structures needed to strengthen and future-proof your organization.
Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen
Managing Director & Partner
Master of Law
Mobile: +45 22 42 18 11
Email: aba@lead.eu
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