Accelerating Prosperity
How to create positive impact for People, Planet and Profit as an Individual, a Professional, and a Leader
The pursuit of Profit alone is an outdated concept.
It’s bad for the health of People and the health of our Planet.
The Business world should consign it to the recycling bin of history.
The 21st Century demands a more sophisticated approach to creating value.
Value for People, Planet and Profit.
All at the same time.
True Prosperity.
This is the only pathway to a thriving and prosperous life for everyone on this planet.
To switch from our current trajectory, we must take action.
We must become changemakers.
As Individuals. As Professionals. As Leaders.
Whatever level you’re operating on, you’ll need to do 4 things to make the switch.
Think bigger — To educate yourself about what really matters for you, understand the systems you are part of, the negative impacts you are responsible for and the positive impact and value you intend to create.
Reframe the challenges — To take accountability for what matters most and chart a course towards a prosperous future, you’ll need to learn how to set goals for the benefit of people, planet & profit.
Apply leverage — To maximise the impact and value of your actions by using strategic points of leverage to multiply any force you apply
Beat the system — To embed and drive real change through a connected culture of changemakers, working together for maximum impact and value
Change at an individual level
The best place to start driving change is with you.
To help you think bigger, I recommend a bit of self-reflection on your own way of life.
Parisa Wright, CEO of charity Greener & Cleaner, provides a useful guide to get started.
I recommend measuring your household carbon footprint to get a better sense of what you consume and the impact it has. By breaking down and measuring your personal impact you can start to assess where you can make a difference.
It’s easy, especially if you have ready access to your bank statements and bills — It took me less than one hour.
I took the data that the report generated and visualised my Carbon emissions in a pie chart which really helped me reframe my personal challenges.
It also made it much easier to concentrate my efforts so that I could find opportunities to apply leverage where small changes would have a big impact.
For me that meant 3 immediate changes:
- Switching to a more ethical, renewable energy provider, Ecotricity. Saving me literally a tonne of CO2 a year and reducing my annual bill (If you’re thinking of switching, please use the link above, it gives me £25 off my bill, so good for People, Planet and Profit 😃)
- A conscious effort to reduce the amount of meat, especially beef, that I consume, leading to exploration and testing of more meat-free recipes. Again, almost a tonne of CO2 avoided from this change
- A change to our household’s car usage to rely more on public transport. Half a tonne of CO2 avoided
I also had a rethink on all the single-use plastic wrap coming into the house and switched out as many of them as possible.
To help beat the system I’ve done several things.
Firstly, I’ve spread the word to encourage others to make improvements.
I’m writing about what you can do, and given that you’re reading about it, I hope you feel inspired to take action to make positive changes of your own.
I’ve spoken to lots of people about how quick and easy it was to make a change (around an hour of work), how much impact I’ve made (3 tonnes of CO2 avoided this year and counting), and how it’s actually saved me money (£50 a month immediately with more savings to come).
The next thing I did was to look for people who would help change the system using the power of my vote.
After an hour of research, I established that the Liberal Democrats have clear goals to address Climate change, although their thinking is pretty outdated. Their current Manifesto, dating from 2019, still leads with “Stop Brexit”.
Meanwhile The Conservative Party is more focused on 5 other matters in terms of their five priorities, 3 of which show a focus on Profit, with 1 for People, 1 clearly against People (stop the boats) and none for Planet.
The Labour Party had the most up-to-date manifesto and also a credible plan to unblock the backlog of wind and solar projects across the UK (the waiting list is currently 10–15 years) that would accelerate the connection of renewable energy sources to the national grid, thus reducing our energy dependency on fossil fuels and the price fluctuations we’ve experienced recently.
Change at a professional level
What applies to your personal life applies equally to your professional life.
You can start your professional journey of thinking bigger by examining what your organisation says to its Stakeholders about what’s important beyond making Shareholders Profits.
If you work in a larger organisation like I do, you’ll probably be able to read through your company’s annual report — Here’s BT Group’s 2022 report where I work, which speaks to our goals of “creating a responsible, inclusive and sustainable business”.
Even if you work in a smaller organisation without dedicated people working towards a more sustainable way of carrying out business, you can and should look to see what other companies are doing to see what you can learn.
Check if you have any form of Manifesto, Sustainability strategy, or Materiality Matrix. This will tell you what’s important for your business and external stakeholders.
Ask around if you have any Impact measurement frameworks like a Carbon Reporting Methodology.
You can then reflect on what kind of impacts are most relevant for your line of business which will help you reframe your professional challenges.
For example, I work in the Business division of BT, serving business customers across the UK and the world. The potential for creating value for People, Planet and Profit is huge.
From a Sustainability perspective there are 3 ways I can contribute to helping our customers avoid emitting CO2
- By helping them reduce the need for travel and thereby reduce travel-related emissions by digitising and connecting their operations
- By reducing their energy consumption and network/IT-related emissions
- By improving the circularity of the products and services we provide to reduce the carbon impacts in their sourcing, manufacture, distribution, usage, repair and end of life
Just like how I was able to measure my own Carbon Footprint, there are ways to understand the impacts your Business has on the world, by looking beyond your operations to what happens upstream and downstream of your business, across the entire value chain you form part of.
To find focus areas where you can apply leverage within your organisation you can map out your operations and capabilities using a Service Blueprint and then apply an assessment framework like The Carbon Method from Amardeep and Gurmit Shakhon to understand your impacts.
To look beyond your organisation, you could also use a Circular Product Blueprint to map the life cycle and impact of a product line from material extraction, through to what happens at the end of the product’s life. Here’s a handy example from Minou Schilling to help you break this down.
To beat the system, there’s nothing stopping you from spreading the word amongst your colleagues about how you’ve uncovered data and insights and the value this has helped you create beyond pure profit.
Critically, you can self-organise by setting up communities of people who want to make a difference to build a critical mass of Changemakers across your organisation. You can create a movement and use your voices and choices to persuade leaders of the need to take accountability and action over the impact that organisations have on the world.
Change at a leadership level
Driving change at a leadership level works on 2 levels.
Change within your organisation and change across your industry.
Change within your organisation
Leaders have the greatest scope for impact and the greatest challenges in thinking bigger.
Within your organisation, you have the opportunity to unlock the full brain power of your people to create more value for People, Planet and Profit.
To achieve this, you’ll need to create the right conditions for them to succeed, point them in the right direction by reframing their challenges, and support them along the way.
Reframing organisational challenges is a great place to start because it’s a common activity that you’ll be used to carrying out and evaluating on a regular basis.
The trick will be how you connect outcomes for People and Planet to your Profits.
I’ve found that organisations are increasingly looking to achieve all three with their suppliers during their procurement and bidding process.
Rather than focus on the best value for money, companies are now looking for suppliers they would be proud to do business with, who can help them reduce their carbon emissions and impacts, who don’t represent a risk for their future business continuity and come armed with proof points about the value of their diversity and inclusion policies for their people and stakeholders.
Finding and applying points of leverage is a game I find I’m always playing at work.
The question I keep asking myself here is — what are the parts of your Operating Model where you can make a change to force people to behave in a consistently different fashion?
Here are a few pivot point for you to consider
- Decision points — anywhere you plan to spend capital you can add a clause or consideration to be more sustainable, whether that’s a business case or a new contract with a supplier. For example at BT, we will only do business with suppliers who have net zero policies and plans in place
- Ways of working — anywhere you manage scope and define outcomes you can include organisational outcomes that contribute towards People, Planet and Profit. For example, when setting Objectives and Key Results, you can and should include objectives that align to your organisational sustainability goals
- Idea Generation — anywhere you generate and evaluate ideas to achieve your organisational outcomes, you can feed in insights not only about what’s limiting revenue or increasing cost, but also what’s having a negative impact in terms of sustainability.
- Rewards and Incentives — anywhere you evaluate what to recognise and reward people on, you can choose to recognise value they’ve created for People and Planet as well as profit
To beat the system, there are several things you can do to create positive feedback loops.
You can
- Become a better Storyteller to help drive awareness
- Sponsor and support changemakers and activists within your organisation to drive collaborative improvements to your operating model
- Celebrate the value that Prosperous business creates for People, Planet and Profit
Change across your Industry
Across your industry, you have the opportunity to bring organisations from across your value chain together to collaborate for an even bigger impact.
To think bigger on this scale, it’s useful to apply some Systems Thinking to improve your understanding of the complex dynamics at play and how and where you can make interventions to drive positive impacts.
3 of the best Systems Thinkers I have found to learn from are
- the late Donella Meadows, author of Thinking in Systems
- Sonja Haut , author of The Case for Impact, and
- Simon Sharpe, author of Five times faster
They have all helped me reframe my understanding of the parts of the system in play, their complex interrelationships and where I might focus my energies best to make an impact.
They have also helped me reframe the challenges I see being faced by Sustainability leaders working at an Industry level.
So many people working at this level are inundated by complex challenges and demands on their time and energy, but what’s going to make the biggest difference and impact in the end?
More time spent on ESG reporting?
More time lobbying for better Sustainability Legislation?
Or would something else lead more people to take action?
Systems thinking helps to find and apply points of leverage across complex systems.
Some crude modelling of the systems at play using the excellent Loopy systems dynamics tool would suggest that more reporting and legislation might have a negative effect, and perhaps shifting to telling people more relatable and emotionally impacting stories might be a better way to drive systemic change.
Armed with this understanding, one can then convene and connect people across an industry or value chain to beat the system.
I was at a great FuturePlanet event run by Carl Pratt where I listened to the powerhouse that is Claire Atkins Morris of Sodexo talk about how she was fed up of the challenges she faced measuring scope 1, 2 and especially scope 3 emissions (something that every business in every industry faces), so she got all of her Tier 1 value chain suppliers and customers together and she got them to agree to share data and methods to bring their collective emissions data into sharper focus.
This is a great example of cross-industry thinking to solve systemic challenges.
Carl is approaching systemic challenges in a similar way by seeking to pool together examples and case studies from across industries to provide a toolkit of tried and tested methods to help amplify what’s working and help people to avoid reinventing the wheels.
Accelerate prosperity now
I hope you’ll join me on my journey to accelerate prosperity.
I hope you will reflect on how you can Think bigger, Reframe the challenge, Apply leverage and Beat the system through greater collaboration.
As individuals we can and must take action, break out of any sense of isolation and despair, seize the moment and actively seek better ways to build critical mass.
As professionals we can apply the same approach, just with the power of your colleagues and stakeholders to support and encourage you.
As leaders we can exert the greatest influence and impact, both within and across industries.
Let’s make life more prosperous together.
Ready to make a difference?
There’s one thing you can do right now to get your journey started.
The Toolkit is aset of simple to follow canvases designed for Business Leaders, Designers, Changemakers, Sustainability experts and Stakeholder community leaders to mobilise people to take action and create positive impacts across their organisations and value chains to create prosperity.
