Thought Leadership

Sustainability as Core Business

Tony McCartney - Sustainability as Core Business

As I concluded in my last post successfully delivering sustainability outcomes is mostly about people.  Not surprisingly this is the heart of any successful business.  As a sole trader, you can easily opt for a sustainable approach to your endeavor as your values shape your offering and providing your market isn’t too narrow you will engage a client pool that shares this set of values.  In the corporate environment, the challenge increases exponentially as you need alignment of many internal teams and external stakeholders.  To get this alignment you need much broader buy-in and to get that buy-in you need a framework.

Successful sustainability architecture is about simplicity.  It needs to be easily understood, enable rapid adaptation and demonstrate achievement.  It can’t control; it must influence.  

Tony McCartney - Sustainability as Core Business

A four wellbeing approach (People, Financial, Relationships and Environment) is a good place to start as these are inherent work streams in all organisations.  Unsurprisingly these are what underpins earlier organisational efficiency based initiatives like Value Management and Balanced Score Cards.  The real secret, however, is aligning a broad span of individual values into a cohesive movement under these wellbeings to ultimately become organisational culture.  John Kotter’s dual operating system model (refer his book XLR8) provides the visualisation of how this should work.  It shows how any team(s) or individuals could engage and then be empowered to achieve sustainable outcomes in their particular endeavor.

As with any adaption the ‘devil's in the detail’ so I’ll provide my views in subsequent posts but if you have any thoughts or experiences I’d be happy to hear them.