Judy Wicks transformed her Philadelphia restaurant into a Community Food Enterprise. She has created multiple environmental and social good. Restaurant profits are sourced from local farms – farmers are featured on some of the menus. From a simple start of looking for free range pork, her enterprise has snowballed into a huge range of sustainability projects.
Here is a link to another video with more info. Do you have a similar enterprise in your city?
Ultimately, sustainability can only be built on the transformation of human character. The brilliant John Elkington did a great job by presenting three dimensions of sustainability – economic, environmental and social (people, planet and profit). Its becoming ever more clear, that the myopic pursuit of economic sustainability alone, is ironically, unsustainable. Or to put it another way, its getting hard and harder to make a buck for most people. Our economic systems are getting more and more complex and encumbered by their own dysfunction. And consequent erosions of social and environmental systems compound the dysfunction.
Sue Knight’s iceberg principle indicates that the behaviours we get (what people say and do) is determined by what is below the surface (purpose, identity, beliefs, values and capabilities). You can’t change behaviour sustainably without changing the sub-surface drivers. I have road-tested this model over the years with observation of human behaviour (including my own) and I find it it be very useful. The remainder of this blog is predicated on the iceberg as an excellent model of human behaviour. It is applied here not just for explaining individual behaviour, but also for the behaviour of collectives, such as corporates. If your not convinced, you can exit here or maybe comment on the validity of the model.
Where sustainability behaviours artificially overlay a conventional culture of myopic profit pursuit, the iceberg is fractured. The old “beneath the surface factors” aren’t compatible with true sustainability and the resulting behaviours include green washing and reputation-mending. I suspect that even overlaying the more enlightened strategy of sustainability as a competitive advantage will not be truly sustainable until the sub-surface drivers change. Internal forces will continue to generate company behaviours compatible with the old drivers.
True sustainability will naturally emanate from below the surface sustainability drivers such as those in the diagram below. Motives of extraction and exploitation will be supplanted by those of contribution and service. (The examples of purpose, identity, values, beliefs and capabilities used here are arbitrary and could be replaced by others.)
The drivers that underpin sustainability will translate, over time, to the transformation of character. But can we change? We definitely can! For eons, humanity has been driven mostly by survival drives (see my blog on The End of Empires). When the survival drive is our default mode, more elevated and altruistic expressions of character, innate in humans, are suppressed.
As more of us begin to see that our ancient embedded drives are actually counter-productive, and compromising our survival, I believe we will refine our character and generate sustainability drivers for the benefit of our businesses and communities. An exciting prospect is the reinforcing nature of this virtuous cycle. As we improve character, a more sustainable environment is a more compatible ecosystem to work and live in. Over time, we learn that sustainability is in our self-interest. As we reach a tipping-point where these drivers become more common, there will be multiple unintended beneficial outcomes.
So does this sound too optimistic? I believe there is strong evidence to support this position. In the interests of brevity, here are two examples.
Jeremy Riftkin’s RSA Animate video anticipates “the empathic civilisation”. He argues that we are wired more for empathy than competition.
There is a rich vein of evidence that a more human focussed approach to running business generates better outcomes than older command and control models. A recent paper from the Maritz Institute posits that “Outdated beliefs about human action and interaction hold us in a transactional model of engagement.” Their paper links “the new normal” to a enlightened understanding of human drivers and interaction. These support better stakeholder engagement and (I would add) sustainability.
“A new framework for stakeholder engagement is needed … a framework anchored in the latest research relative to human drives and behavior. The goal of this framework is to create better business results that, at the same time, enrich stakeholders in ways that are most meaningful to them. It is about building a win-win proposition … Better Business. Better Lives”. (from The Game Has Changed, Maritz Institute)
Let me know if you think we are on the road to achieving this – or not.
There are a belwildering array of sustainability ratings – but what do we believe? How do we know they are measuring and evaluating the right things?
In their Rate the Raters documents, SustainAbility identified over 50 sustainability rating agencies. SustainAbility will offer insights into how credible each rating system is, but I suspect that many imponderables will remain. For example, in part two of the study, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index was ranked highest in credibility by the study’s participants. But in his article titled, When Pigs Fly, RP Siegal noted with incredulity that Haliburton is now listed in the Dow Jones Sustainability Index.
Here are two reasons that determining a company’s sustainability will remain problematic:
The bureaucratisation and commercialisation of quality processes
In the galaxy of organisation endeavour, sustainability reporting can be regarded as a quality measure. For example, while the ISO 9000 series deals with operational quality matters, the ISO 14000 series deals with environmental management. While ISO 14,000 may not be classified as sustainability reporting, it serves the same purpose, in that it provides third party assurance of a quality measure.
I like Tom Peters perspective on quality. He quotes Richard Buetow, a Motorola executive.
With ISO 9000 you can still have terrible processes and products. You can certify a manufacturer that makes life jackets from concrete, as long as those jackets are made according to the documented procedures and the company provides next of kin with instructions on how to complain about defects. That’s absurd.
Where quality processes are formalised, they can divert resources from the product or service itself. Any product or service will justify a finite amount of resource input, so ideally, any quality process will add value equal to or greater than its cost. Too often, compliance-driven quality processes militate against quality as they divert resources away from product or service delivery. This is a big issue in service delivery sectors such as education and health. When teachers spend more time on quality assurance processes, they spend less time on preparation for delivery. It may be that, unless there is a compelling reason to get third party assurance, that resource is best invested in enacting sustainability aspirations, rather than measuring them.
I’m not arguing against quality processes – but I am stressing that they have to add value. Sustainability reporting processes will add value to the economic bottom line where there are game-changing benefits. For example:
But unless there are clear benefits from quality process third party assurance, why bother?
BP’s gulf oil spill illustrates this issue. Along with Shell, BP scored consistently highly in GRI (Global Reporting Initative) reports, and I believe the company’s leaders had, and have, genuine sustainability aspirations. BP invested a lot in rebranding as “beyond petroleum.” But the gulf oil spill incident has undone a lot of the energy BP had invested in sustainability initiatives. What the GRI couldn’t assess, were complex embedded processes, such as the quality of engagement between BP and its suppliers, and the impact of budgets and deadlines on safety and operations.
Commercialisation
No doubt ratings agencies are also well motivated, but budget pressures will typically create pressure to grow the business and perhaps make processes than they need be. SustainAbility’s Rating the Raters cites commercial pressures as an impediment to more transparent report, partly because the raters are paid by those being rated.
Determining sustainability
Part two of this blog will explore what sustainability means in different industries, and from whose perspective.
Here is a first in a series of blogs offering a interpretation of human history positioning the times we are in now as the end of a long historical saga of empire building, and the dawn of a new global civilisation. In later posts I will explore the parallel shift from economies of exploitation and extraction to sustainable economies. And the agency of civilisation becomes communication, rather than conquest.
We are all descendents of Rift Valley refugees – our ancestors left Africa thousands of years ago and dispersed across the planet. Thus began the long migration, with humans constantly expanding into new territory. My country, New Zealand, was the end of the line, first colonised only about a thousand years ago by my wife’s Mäori ancestors, and further colonised by my European ancestors in the last 200 years.
This grand human saga has been civilisation by conquest. One group of humans would establish a foothold in a locality, but never for too long before being displaced by another, usually violently. Alternately, a sub-group, motivated by aversion to the status quo and/or the lure of new horizons would move on to establish a new colony. For years, the planet had abundant resources to fuel humanity’s relentless expansion. There were brief periods of peace and stability, but few lives were untouched by conflict.
This became the default human experience and patterned behaviours such as displays of dominance, disputes over resources, and ingrained insecurity predominated. Edgar Schein’s model of culture can be applied to this pervasive human culture. At the top level of Schein’s model are artefacts – the artefacts of the age of conquest changed over time, along with the characters in the war stories, but the essence of the stories was the same. As our ancestors replayed the stories over time they ingrained underlying assumptions of what life is all about and reinforced enduring drivers of human behaviour – “growth is good”, “extracting value” and “us and them”. Occasionally, enlightened individuals and movements would emerge but they would typically be usurped by those possibly influenced by the new, but reverting to the old patterns of behaviour.
Schein’s classic definition of culture indicates how these patterns of behaviour are reinforced as the right way.
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 2010 page 18)
This pattern of behaviour caused great injustices, but our species thrived. As we learned to further develop our intelligence we arrived at a point in our development, 250 years ago, to use machines to further accelerate our expansion and extraction of the world’s resources. But in the last few decades the combination of this new technology and the old patterns of thinking have manifested a set of problems dwarfing any that humanity has faced before. Its time for a course correction.
We also appear to be at the end of the age of empires. The social evolution of humanity has seen us aggregate into larger and larger groups and embracing wider loyalties. What we loosely call “Western civilisation” is the last of the empires, or perhaps more correctly, a cluster of empires. The centre of power has shifted from Europe to the United States and colonisation has been more by commerce than by occupation, but it can be seen as an extension of the processes begun by Europeans for over a millennia.
Economist Jeffrey Sachs, in his book Commonwealth, describes the process of convergence, whereby the United States position of a superpower is waning, and major economies head towards a state of convergence, where no single economy can dominate.
A new kind of global politics must take shape, built not on U.S. or Chinese preeminence, but on global cooperation across regions. Despite the reveries and fantasies of some, the age of empire is over, and certainly the age of a U.S. empire. We are now in the age of convergence.
Any thoughts so far. Part 2 of this series of posts looks at Civilisation by Engagement and Community Building.
I have been looking for examples of excellent stakeholder engagement. Recently, I have reconnected with the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and found the same quality of material as before. What’s different is that a ethos of engagement permeates the magazine.
Here are some examples from the May 2011 edition:
The HBR magazine is the hardcopy compliment to a range of social media options that offer multiple ways for readers to engage.
In addition HBR has a Linkedin group and portrays an engagement ethos at twitter.
HBR appear to have left no stone unturned to create opportunities to engage with stakeholders. The icons of business thinking that appeared so remote in the past are now much closer to us.
Do you know of other examples of engaging magazines?
Steps to Sustainability 