Think Bigger
Welcome to Part 1 of Plan B where we learn to think beyond our organisational boundaries, get to grips with what being more sustainable means for the value chains we are part of and develop the foundations we need to reframe the Sustainability challenges we face and set better goals in Part 2 of Plan B
The subject of Sustainability, when considered on any scale, is complex, with multiple interwoven dimensions to reflect on, confusing acronyms and jargon that get in the way of understanding and many, many levels of nested detail to distract you from taking action.
It’s confusing to know where to start.
Climate change, carbon emissions, renewable energy, waste reduction and social inequality are just a few of a seemingly endless and growing list of topics to consider.
How can we quickly make sense of what’s going on to start making a difference without getting lost in the details?
How can we think bigger and then zoom in down to the right level of detail?
In this article, we’re going to explore 3 questions
- Q. What does Sustainability mean for me?
- Q. Which Stakeholders do I impact?
- Q. What Impacts are most material?
The approach we’ll take to answer these questions involves 3 techniques
- Developing Empathy — taking a human-centred approach to gain perspective on what’s happening for the people who have something at stake (aka the Stakeholders)
- Finding Patterns — visualising the systems that impact Sustainability so we can find patterns and connect the dots between what’s going on inside and outside our organisational boundaries
- Making Connections — building networks with stakeholders outside of our organisations to gain a richer perspective, understand the impacts we create and tackle the biggest shared challenges
Using these techniques will help us answer our 3 questions and set us up for success for Part 2 of Plan B where we will work with our stakeholders to reframe our challenges and define a more sustainable set of business goals that we can use to hack the system in part 3 of Plan B.
Let’s run through each technique, and learn why it’s almost always easier to make sense of complex problems by starting with Empathy.
Developing Empathy
As a designer, I find it’s useful to make sense of subjects that involve people by taking a human-centred approach and seeking to understand and focus on what’s meaningful to the people involved in any given scenario, whether they play a direct or indirect role.
Being human-centred means that I start by understanding those different types of people involved through research, interviews, surveys and analysis of existing data to understand their viewpoints, feelings, goals and needs in any given scenario. This makes it much easier to identify any hidden underlying root cause issues or drivers that can be addressed that could create value for multiple groups of people.
This approach may sound obvious, but as someone who has trained and coached 1000s of people on human-centred design and testing business ideas before launching them, it’s rare for people to think this way.
The majority of people I work with across organisations, especially larger organisations where people specialise in certain subject matters, tend to have a bias towards making untested assumptions about what their customers want and need. This leads them instinctively to focus on what they believe is the right solution even though there may not be a big enough problem to solve for anyone in the first place.
If it’s rare for people to test their thinking about their customers or colleague’s needs before jumping into solution mode, it’s rarer still for people to consider anyone other than their immediate customers in any depth.
The challenges and pains experienced by stakeholders across our society who are indirectly affected by the decisions taken by business leaders, are at best, unfortunately an afterthought.
It’s this combination of biases, thinking and behaviours that has led to the unintended social impacts on People across our society and environmental impacts on living things on our Planet, and it’s why having genuine empathy for others and a validated understanding of what’s impacting them is so important.
With Empathy you can
- create a shared understanding of what’s going on, which helps us to challenge our assumptions about Sustainability, mitigate biases and minimise blind spots
- identify and engage with all relevant stakeholders to gain further insights on the impacts they face that could help us drive business innovation
- agree what’s most material to our stakeholder community in terms of impact so we can reframe and focus our efforts on the right challenges
Empathy for business leaders
As discussed previously in my article “Your Sustainability wakeup call”, I’m not trying to win the hearts and minds of everyone on the planet when it comes to making more sustainable decisions.
The people I’m focusing on in Plan B are the business decision-makers of large organisations as they have the greatest potential- and largely untapped impact on Sustainability of anyone on the planet.
To be specific, I’m talking about the CEOs, Managing Directors, Directors and Senior Managers of organisations with over 1,000 employees.
To be even more specific, I think it’s actually the Directors and Senior Managers — as well as the Sustainability, Data, Technology and Design Leaders that support them — that have the greatest untapped potential to make a difference.
This group of people have the internal networks, working knowledge of customers and the business and the necessary reserves of political capital within and across organisations to drive the level of collaboration that’s going to be needed to take the action that’s required for Sustainability.
Understanding decision-making power
This may be an unpopular opinion for some readers who work for consultancies or agencies, but if you’re reading this and you’re not working within one of these large organisations, then the reality is that it’s going to be very difficult for you to align sufficient people to build the critical mass and ongoing momentum that you will need to make a difference for sustainability.
What I have witnessed again and again is that external partners seeking to drive this kind of change lack the broad senior sponsorship, empowerment in terms of decision-making rights and most importantly, the sufficient time to drive the level of continuous engagement and change that’s needed across an organisation.
The political capital and goodwill that’s required in any major business endeavour can take years to build up.
Whilst hacking any system can be started in a few strokes of a keyboard these days, the complex nature of Sustainability means that it requires sustained effort from a number of stakeholders to inspect what’s going on and adapt to changing circumstances.
The importance of this will become clearer in parts 3 and 4 of Plan B where we look beyond focusing on small initiatives and work to hack the system of business and maximise impact.
Potential vs untapped power
Now you may be asking why CEOs and Managing Directors are not at the top of my list.
This isn’t because they’re not important. They are very important.
They clearly have the most potential power for impact.
But the reality is that for most large organisations, certainly ones with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) commitments or Net zero emissions targets, I believe that the CEOs and Managing Directors have already taken many of the simpler and quicker actions they can take on their own to be more sustainable.
For example, decisions to pick off the “low-hanging fruit” like choosing 100% renewable energy providers or contracting exclusively with net-zero suppliers have already been taken.
These types of decisions, ones you can take with a single signature on a contract, take relatively little collaboration across organisation and can be authorised by a tiny fraction of decision-makers.
To address complex Sustainability challenges is going to take more.
Much more.
As of writing in early 2023, we know we are going to miss many of our Climate targets.
According to the Climate Action Tracker, in the United Kingdom, where I live, what we are doing is insufficient to keep up with our Climate commitments, especially in terms of doing our fair share and the human activities we are financing through the banking sector in the UK.
At the same time, you only have to glance at any newsstand or listen to the news to hear the daily drumbeat of reports talking of inflation, soaring energy costs, the cost of living crisis and conflict.
It’s pretty clear that we’re not living up to our social ideals.
We need to do more. A lot more.
But what remains are complex, wicked problems that require more than the powers that individual CEOs and Managing Directors of large organisations have.
We need to tap into the collective potential and untapped brain power, knowledge and collective action of the rest of large organisations, the supply chains they are part of, and the lived experience of the stakeholder communities they impact.
The messy middle
To truly think bigger, see the full set of challenges we face and come up with innovative solutions to make our organisations more sustainable will involve unlocking the collective knowledge and creativity of “the messy middle”.
My research amongst the messy middle shows that the top reasons that are stopping them getting more engaged with Sustainability is
- #1 — they don’t know where to start
- #2 — they’re not sure who to talk to for support
- #3 — they’re incredibly busy already.
Business leaders don’t have time for complex theories.
They just need to know the choices available to them, so they can take action and drive results.
To help this group of people grasp what’s going on, show them where they need to start and provide them with a clear set of choices to choose from, we are going to visualise what Sustainability means to help them build a shared understanding of the “Big Picture”, what’s relevant for them and who they need to connect with to understand their choices and make more sustainable decisions.
Finding Patterns
“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context — a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”
- Eliel Saarinen
We’re going to take this approach to answer our first 2 questions around “What does Sustainability mean for me?” and “Which Stakeholders do I impact?” by starting with the largest context for Sustainability first and work down through the levels of detail.
We’ll go all the way down to what’s most relevant for our ringleaders and influencers until we identify the relevant stakeholder groups that organisations have an impact on. Their involvement will be critical in Part 2 of Plan B where we Reframe our challenges.
Let’s take a look at what Sustainability means for people at the scale of
- Planet
- Business
- Business unit
- Stakeholders
As we go, we will map out the parts of the system to visualise what we collectively consider to be important, partly to externalise our thinking and make sure we understand each other and partly to see how each element fits together to drive positive or negative impacts.
By making sense of what’s most important at the highest level of scale, we can more easily make sense of what’s happening at the next level down by seeing if the same patterns apply or if we can focus on a smaller subset of factors.
So let’s get started on seeing the big picture and zoom out to the widest zoom level we can, giving us a view of all major human activities across the Planet and helping us to explore what’s important for business decision-makers from a Sustainability perspective.
Sustainability at a Global scale
By understanding the Biggest Picture view of Sustainability, we get a grasp of the system as a whole — the inputs we consume, the activities we undertake across our global network of industrial and societal value chains, the outputs we transform them into for Profit and the impacts we have on People and Planet across the entire system.
By visualising the system we not only build a shared understanding of what’s going on but we also have foundations we can use to overlay our assumptions and data points on top of.
Diagram 1.0 below helps to visualise the systems at play on a Global scale and simplify the Big Picture of what’s relevant for Business leaders.
You’ll note that the main headers for each part of the system are the people involved in that part of the system, which is in recognition that this is a human-driven system.
The major groupings of human activities and impacts include those led by
- Suppliers
- Colleagues
- Customers
- Stakeholders
You’ll also note that at the bottom of the diagram we have references to where in the value chain these human activities take place
- Upstream — covering all suppliers and purchases
- Operational — covering all activities the business has direct control over
- Downstream — covers all activities arising from the usage of products by customers and what happens to those products at end-of-life
These terms to describe parts of the value chain are not only the simplest descriptions currently being used to define the scope of impacts, but they are also recognised and used by the Value Balancing Alliance (VBA) who are doing some amazing work with the big 4 accounting firms and organisations at the cutting edge of sustainable decision-making.
The VBA are testing and promoting a structured and industry-approved approach to impact evaluation and measurement that organisations can use to adjust their impact measurement and accounting practices to make more sustainable decisions.
Suppliers
Think of suppliers as the businesses that form the upstream Global supply chain for all organisations and societies around the world. For most businesses, this is where the majority of their impacts on People and especially Planet take place.
For your business, this is everyone your organisation conducts business with, including their suppliers, in order to operate and create the goods and services that you supply to your customers.
The supply chain is where the degree of control that a business has over the impacts that get created is the lowest. Businesses have a limited set of levers to control what goes on here, for example by deciding which suppliers they do business with.
Suppliers provide many different inputs for their customers, this can be in the form of
- energy to run a business operation or activity
- raw or recycled materials to use in the manufacture of products, devices or machines
- water to use as an ingredient, dilute or cool
- time savings on creating something more efficiently of effectively than anyone else
- Providing information, analysis or insight
- Supplying ready-made, “off the shelf” products or services or components to be used in the creation of products or services
Colleagues
The people who run your day-to-day business operations, your colleagues, directly control what happens within a business. Their activities, conducted in service of each organisation’s goals are carried out using the set of capabilities available to each organisation.
Those activities will vary depending on the type of business in question, but the diagram illustrates some of the key types of activities an organisation undertakes.
Capabilities are the things that help a business do something more effectively than an individual or another business can. Typically this is the combination of people, processes, information and technology systems available to the organisation to carry out their activities in a cost-effective manner.
Goals you can think of as the aims of the strategy of the organisation, usually embodied in some kind of mission, vision or purpose supported by principles which colleagues can use as a means to guide their choices. Colleagues are further guided on a tactical level by Objectives and Key Results — ways to measure whether the strategy is being achieved.
Customers
The people who buy any organisation’s products and services are their customers. They may go on to use those products or services themselves as consumers or make use of them to produce something else as that they go on to sell to others.
Customers create their own waste and drive their own impact, but they can also be a source of recyclable or reusable materials to feed back into the wider system.
Stakeholders
Finally we have the widest group of people who are impacted by the intended and unintended consequences of decisions and actions taken by Suppliers, Colleagues and Customers — Our Stakeholders.
This group of people can represent a variety of factors and stakeholders who don’t have a voice like rainforests, the oceans, the air, wildlife, or people who live in poverty and have a limited voice.
Sustainability at a Business scale
The big picture for an entire business is then a subset of what we consider on a Global scale.
In my example, I’ve used BT Group, where I work, to provide more details on
- Different types of suppliers and inputs we need to run our business group
- Specific activities and capabilities we use to achieve our goals
- The types of outputs we provide our consumer and business customers
- The impacts on people, planet and profit that are most material to our stakeholders
A good way to work out what makes up your organisation’s system map, especially if you work in a large organisation is to look at your company’s web site and see if you can find any kind of Manifesto, Sustainability strategy, Materiality Matrix, Carbon Reporting Methodology and ESG or Carbon reporting.
By looking at what’s publicly available for BT Group, I was able to make sense of the information according to these systemic groupings to create this view.
Sustainability at a Business Unit scale
As we zoom into the next level down into a specific business unit, in this case, BT Group’s Global Business unit’s Cloud infrastructure division, we can see again that we can take a subset of the elements of the system above.
In terms of complexity, this is a simpler picture to make sense of, and it allows Decision-makers to get a much clearer picture of their stakeholders.
Stakeholders to focus on
By taking the picture above and turning the contrast down on everything apart from the people, we can bring the different stakeholder groups that are relevant to a particular business unit into sharper focus.
This is a good moment to reflect for Decision-makers.
- Do you have connections with your stakeholders?
- Do you know what impact each stakeholder creates?
- Do you know how stakeholders are impacted?
If the answer to any of the above is no, then this is a sign to build your network and educate yourself about the intended and unintended consequences of your decisions.
Making connections
The purpose of making connections with relevant stakeholder groups that you impact is threefold.
- Developing empathy for these stakeholders and getting a sense of what’s really happening for them is essential. After all, if you’re planning on making a tangible impact for these stakeholders, you would hope to see that difference, and to see that difference you would need a connection of some sort.
- Gathering data — you need to assess and measure impact to assess what choices to make. Given the scarcity of reliable impact measurements available to businesses, you either have to put them in place yourself, which takes time and effort, or rely on data disclosures from other sources. Your stakeholders may already have invaluable data you could use if you partner with them
- Build trust with these stakeholder groups. When it comes to sustainability — credibility is key. Whether you’re talking about ensuring that your business is not “greenwashing” its activities or buying into carbon offset schemes that need to be written off as worthless due to poor governance and checks on the purported impacts of those schemes.
For us, it’s the empathy and data that’s most critical for our efforts as we think ahead to part 2 of Plan B to reframe our challenges.
Given the size of the challenges businesses face, we can’t tackle every single Sustainability challenge. We’ll get nowhere fast.
Each business needs to focus and align their people to maximise impact.
Each leader needs to understand their own unique circumstances and set of stakeholders and assess what’s most material to them to factor in these challenges alongside their traditional business objectives to make the most sustainable decisions.
Establishing Materiality
To answer our final question, “What Impacts are most material?”, we’ll explore the concept of what’s most material or important to an organisation’s stakeholders.
This is something that I’m very proud that my father, Peter Wong, had a role in defining during his time as a board member of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).
In 2006, the initiative was one of the first to develop and promote the idea of materiality as part of sustainability reporting in its G3 reporting guidelines.
They defined Materiality as
“the principle that disclosures should be included in the report if they are reasonably considered important for reflecting the organisation’s economic, environmental, and social impacts, or influencing the decisions of stakeholders.”
To this day they oversee the industry guidance for assessing materiality and it’s their guidance that we take in Plan B to prioritise our focus.
Most large organisations have already established what’s most material, for example below is an excerpt from BT Group’s ESG Addendum to the BT Group plc Manifesto Report 2022 which shows what our stakeholders have prioritised.
Make sure you check whether your organisation has carried out this activity already.
If they have, you can proceed to part 2 to reframe the challenges you face.
If they haven’t, then keep reading for some guidance on how to proceed.
As it happens, if you follow the guidance above to map out the relevant systems for your organisation, we’ve actually carried out the first 2 of 4 steps the GRI recommends already
- Step 1 — Understand the business context
- Step 2 — identify potential and actual impacts
- Step 3 — Assess & prioritise significance of impacts with stakeholders
Assessing significance
The topic of impact measurement and assessment is not one I am going to go into much detail on in Plan B, as there is so much category-specific information and guidance available already. It’s what most of the sustainability industry focuses on today — measurement.
For readers who want to get a grasp of what impact measurement is all about, I would highly recommend Sonja Haut’s exceptionally well-written book The Case for Impact to get an understanding of the specifics of what to measure given the type of impact in question.
What’s most important here is not to get lost in the details or measuring exactly the right thing.
You may get stuck there forever.
Plan B is about a bias to action.
What’s most important, at least ono the first pass is that you start to focus on the area that’s in greatest need of reducing negative impacts (Hint: for most organisations, getting Carbon emissions under control will be pretty high up on the list).
Give yourself a set amount of time to capture information and recognise that this whole process will be repeated over and over again. You will learn more with each loop as you cover more ground and reveal more data and insight on each pass.
We’ll come back to this idea in part 4 when we consider ways to maximise impact.
You want to increase the number of loops you can get through in any given time period and the way to do that is with a technique known as timeboxing.
I would recommend giving yourself anywhere between a week or a month on your first pass to connect with your stakeholders and the people who are likely to benefit from data and insights you gather to capture as much science-based data as possible.
Qualify types of useful data by talking to people. Quantify data by tapping into existing data sources or running surveys. Create your own data capture methods if it’s practical and pragmatic to get them set up as part of your business as usual activities.
Once you’ve captured what you can, bring it all together and distil it down to the key points so you can play it back to your stakeholders and interested parties to let them decide what your priorities should be.
Prioritising Impacts
Establishing priorities, whether it’s for your business outcomes or your stakeholder outcomes is something you should aim to do regularly. The business, social and environmental conditions we work in are constantly changing, and to remain sustainable in terms of people, planet and profit, we have to constantly adapt.
To this end, the final step in Part 1 of Plan B is to have a prioritised list of impacts to address as an organisation.
To create this list I would recommend gathering your stakeholders on a regular basis to review the impacts that have been identified, gain an understanding of the science behind each impact and conduct a 3-stage vote on each impact before a final prioritisation.
- Initial Vote — give each stakeholder a set of cards numbered 1 to 10 and ask them to vote on one impact at a time to assess the relative importance of the impact from their perspective, where 1 is the lowest and 10 is the highest
- Debate outliers — ask people who provided the highest and lowest score to share why they gave those scores. This may bring new information to light that could influence people
- Final Vote— give everyone a final vote based on the new information and record an average for that score
Once all impacts have been voted on, place them in order of priority for your final list.
Key Takeaways
In Part 1 of Plan, we’ve walked through a systematic way to visualise an end-to-end system and see the inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes we are part of and the impacts that we each contribute to as part of a wider value chain.
By understanding the system, and zooming into the details that are most relevant for our business and business unit, we can more easily identify the people who have a stake in contributing to or being impacted by what happens across those value chains.
Finally, by connecting with and empathising our stakeholders, we can identify what to focus our efforts on to find a balance of what is most material for stakeholders and business to address.
With these impacts now in sharper focus, you now have a mechanism to help guide your strategic choices and you’re ready to proceed to part 2 of Plan B — Reframe the challenge.
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.
