Context, Put Into Practice
Mind the (Knowledge) Gaps
If you don’t discover knowledge gaps early, they will eventually make themselves known at a much greater cost.
– Cloft, Kennedy & Kennedy
Everyone has blind spots and so does every company. Sustainability issues are evolving faster than business practices and creating blind spots. Problems arise when business decisions are made within that gap.
It is well past the time for sustainability-committed companies to re-evaluate business as usual to identify and close knowledge gaps.
Sustainability gaps in society and business are systemic and anecdotally evident in Google nGrams – a measure of frequency of word occurrence in published books.
Unsustainable businesses are a by-product of unsustainable thinking and processes. To achieve sustainability, you must gain the knowledge necessary to succeed.
Sustainability challenges need to be seen as opportunities for development and learning. We can and must build a sustainable world on the back of its constraints.
Assure Success
When it comes to sustainability, we need to learn from the Wright brothers and be certain of success before running off in all directions. They used their high school educations to systematically close vital knowledge gaps and implement successful solutions. Having learned what they needed, they then proceeded with full confidence of success where others used trial-and-error, frequently crashing.
So, your company wants to be sustainable, but does it know how? Companies need to invest in their people and give them the time and resources necessary to identify and close critical knowledge gaps.
Here are just a few examples of questions to be considered:
- How will our business need to change to respect planetary boundaries?
- How are customer expectations changing in response to climate change?
- What new approaches to design, manufacturing and service delivery need to happen to substantially reduce impacts?
- How will a renewables-based economy change our business? Our supply chain?
- How do we ensure that next year's capital expenditures are aligned with our sustainability goals?
- Do we know enough about how our business impacts biodiversity?
- Are we proceeding at risk because of things we do not understand about sustainability?
Sustainability in practice is a discipline of discovery. Every employee needs to be learning and creating sustainability knowledge and applying it for the good of the whole.
Long-term prospects are not good for companies setting targets but lacking mechanisms for developing their people and closing sustainability knowledge gaps.
Capabilities lie at the heart an organization’s ability to achieve results, so it’s hardly a surprise that different results require different capabilities.
– Ron Ashkenas and Logan Chandlery
References:
- Header image: Vincent de Groof perished while testing a flying machine in London in 1874. https://london-overlooked.com/groof/
- Sustainability gaps evident in Google nGrams: business,sustainable,sustainability,ecosystem,biodiversity (1950-2019).
- "If you don’t discover knowledge gaps early, they will eventually make themselves known at a much greater cost." - Success is Assured: Satisfy Your Customers On Time and On Budget by Optimizing Decisions Collaboratively Using Reusable Visual Models by Penny W. Cloft, Michael N. Kennedy, Brian M. Kennedy
- Brooks, Shilo. "Why Did the Wright Brothers Succeed When Others Failed?" Scientific American, March 14, 2020, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-did-the-wright-brothers-succeed-when-others-failed/
- "Capabilities lie at the heart an organization’s ability to achieve results, so it’s hardly a surprise that different results require different capabilities." - Your Strategy Won’t Work If You Don’t Identify the New Capabilities You Need by Ron Ashkenas and Logan Chandler; HBR 2017
