Put Into Practice
Sustainability Success Will Come From Means Not Measures
To achieve sustainability goals, organizations must focus on means, not measures—the how, not how much. With 80% of the top 100 companies in 52 countries reporting on sustainability, how is it that so few behave as truly sustainable businesses should behave?
Companies with aggressive sustainability goals are caught lobbying for regulatory roll-back, or undermining the social compact with aggressive tax avoidance, or shifting environmental burdens to suppliers. This happens too often to be attributed to momentary lapses.
Overly triumphant ESG reports can signal that an organization’s reporting skills outweigh its capacity for executing. This is apparent when you look for evidence of sustainability knowledge or behaviour within the reporting organizations.
From front-line workers to the executive suite, knowledge and competency gaps abound in all functions at all levels. Making matters worse, the focus on metrics and measuring often works cross-purpose to desired outcomes with creativity in reporting substituted for capability.
Walk the Talk or Bait and Switch?
While corporate reporting’s shortcomings are well documented and unaddressed, companies continue to take excessive pride in reporting on progress. Success stories are profiled in sustainability reports and trumpeted as broad cultural outcomes when they are only isolated projects. Often these are not even well known, nor their significance understood, internally at the reporting company.
Too much effort is spent showcasing, tracking, measuring, and reporting, and not enough on building the broad competencies needed to drive and sustain true progress. Even when sustainability targets are laudable and right-minded, we see companies creatively adjusting or quietly abandoning them altogether from year to year to obscure these capability gaps.
In 2012, IKEA committed to having 90% of home furnishing products meeting their sustainability product scorecard’s 11 criteria by FY2015. In FY2016, they reported achieving 55%, far short of their goal and reiterated a 90% target for FY2020. And yet by 2018 there were no further mentions of the goal, let alone progress, and the scorecard is now nowhere to be found.
The Means: Developing Competent People
The point here is not to call out IKEA for their shifting reporting landscape—they are far from alone in this—but to highlight that the focus for sustainability-committed companies must remain squarely on developing their people. This must be done in ways that ensure the company continues becoming more sustainable even as leadership changes its mood or its people.
In IKEA’s case, if all contracted designers were competent in applying the criteria, then goal attainment would be an outflow of capabilities. While targets can drive behaviour, there must be particular emphasis on how a company will get there—and more importantly, stay there.
Every company will be taking a sustainability journey—some as winners, but most as losers. Companies that are not investing effort to broaden sustainability as a competency in their people are risking a lot—stumbling blindly into avoidable risks while failing to find new value opportunities.
2 Comments
Paul MacLean
Typically concise and to the point prose from you, Jim Banks. On this page you have managed to capture much of what is NOT working under the banner of sustainability, especially the overemphasis on reporting. Once an implementer and advocate of EHS management systems, I learned that meaningful reporting was a potential outcome of a fully-implemented and operational management system, at the service of a coherent business strategy. But when reporting becomes an end in itself, with or without the business strategy, on sustainability in this case, it is often little more than an exercise in stakeholder communication, as you have pointed out.
I know you speak from experience in advocating for a focus on building sustainability competencies. Of course, such competencies must flow from a business’s commitment to a strategy that is comprehensively informed by what sustainability really means in its context. I worry that today, failure to connect a business to the reality of its impacts, let alone to drive change based on this reality, is still the reason why most companies are on losing sustainability journeys.
Jim Banks (Author)
Thanks, Paul!
It is a safe bet that most companies are proceeding at risk because of things their people do not understand about sustainability.
What do we need to know to be confident that we will make the right decisions for the business AND for sustainability? Who is making those decisions and on what basis?
Organizations currently make vital decisions affecting their future with incomplete information and erroneous assumptions relating to sustainability.
Sustainable outcomes will only flow from ‘sustainability-literate’, competent people making informed decisions.