How To Make The Business Case for Sustainability?

There is increasing frustration in the sustainability practitioners community over moving Sustainability out of the CSR stage and into the forefront of the strategic planning DNA of organizations and governments.


This is captured beautifully by this article in MIT Sloan Management Review, (from 2005) and in a recent forum on LinkedIn.com.


The question, courtesy of the well respected and talented Yangbo Du, is:


"...Much of the discussion about the business case for sustainability relates to how to make an unsustainable system less unsustainable rather than spurring a paradigm shift. In what ways should such a paradigm shift occur, and what and how much can the private sector contribute towards breaking the cycle of systemic failure...?"


Our perspective on one critical solution, specific to private business, is that cost and pricing mechanisms need to be completely reworked. Senior management, BODs, and stakeholders need to be retrained first at re-evaluting and repricing risk and second at evaluating returns based on multi-horizon gains versus current short term ones.

This is exceedingly difficult, but can happen. The vastly underutilized tools that can provide the accurate metrics (which are essential to accurate cost/price determination) are all in the ICT space. Most haven't been created yet. Our team is developing three or four that hopefully will reach BETA in under 12 months, so we know how challenging this work can be.

Constructing a pragmatic, analytical action plan is far more effective than waiting for transformational management practice. Evolution happens through catalyzing events and interactions. Getting in the trenches, ripping apart existing management methodologies of evaluating performance, teaching optimization not maximization and cyclical instead of linear processes are good places to start.

Its hard work, but it needs to be done.