Decision-making
Decisions, Decisions – How We Make Our World
To bolster the “can do” belief and attitude among employees,
it is important to invest in educating employees about sustainability
as well as to create systems and processes that make it easier
for employees to integrate sustainability into their business decisions.
—Paul Polman & CB Bhattacharya
Decisions: the source of, and answer to, unsustainability. Business decisions are made daily—often with hidden assumptions and gaps in knowledge which lead to unsustainable outcomes.
Often routine or overlooked, the simple act of making a decision is the engine that drives business, policy, human behaviour and global human impacts.
In knowledge work, waste can always be traced back to poor business decisions. By focusing on decisions, and specifically how to factor sustainability into those decisions, there are integration opportunities along the entire company value chain.
This perspective allows for the application of any of the widely available sustainable business frameworks because the intervention points are always the same: business decisions.
What matters most is that key business decisions are made with the best possible information to eliminate unintended, and unsustainable, downstream consequences. So, a critical step in a company’s sustainability transition is to diligently identify key business decisions that will be made in the coming year:
- What major decisions will we be taking to which we will then commit resources?
- Who will be making those decisions and on what basis?
- Have we considered the broader sustainability implications?
- Are we at risk of repeating past mistakes which worsen our sustainability challenges?
- What do we need to know to be confident that we will make the right decisions for the business AND sustainability?
Sustainability begins with something simple that we can all do: make better decisions!