I’m belatedly back to blogging with a post on strategy. It will refer you to some of our tools and should help you deliver a useful intervention for sustainability integration. An overarching strategic framework that is unique to your organisation and that guides sustainability-related decision-making is generally worth the effort.

An organisation’s intersect with society and nature is omni-present and complex.  Strategic integration should make it easier to identify sustainability investments that have potential to scale. Win-win solutions are not always possible, but they widen the possibility space. Making complex issues requires a genuinely diverse range of views. making sure your framework is clear and easy to understand makes this possible.

The framework should help any stakeholder understand your:

• Direction: What ‘forwards’ means for you;
• Ambition: How far and fast you want to go;
• Focus: How you intend to allocate your energy, in broad terms.

Too many organisations hop lightly over points one and two, and apply their minds to quantitative sustainability commitments. It may take a year or two to realise that the first two elements were not as obvious or expendable as they thought.

This five-step strategy primer should help you avoid this costly detour:

1. Understand where you are before tracking trends

Who are you? How did you come to be where you are? Why do you create these products and services? WHy do you distribute them in this way? Once you have insight into these kinds of questions, recognise that they bring you into relationship with trends. From megatrends to local mutterings, trend intel is freely available and expanding by the hour. To make these trends real, ask people to tell you how they are expressing locally.

2. Learn the language your organisation uses to speak about capability

What are your capabilities? How do people talk about them? Which are more or less strategic? To reflect on how your capabilities relate to sustainability, try Incite’s sustainability capability spectrum (‘The Waves’).

3. Use VIROS to help you make sense of your intersect with society and nature

Sustainability issues are highly interconnected. This means that your strategy process gets messy. Some of the ways your organisation intersects with society and nature are unique; some of the ways are unique. We want to know both because this is how you differentiate your response. A common mistake is to confuse sustainability strategy with disclosure. In disclosure, we align with what is expected; in strategy, we look for something special. Before we hunt, we scout the territory. Incite’s VIROS framework can be used to inform a conversation on your organisation’s intersect. By repeating these conversations every year, people become more familiar with the intersect.

4. Use the potential for Profit-Enabled Impact (PEI) to engage diehard business minds

You know that it is possible to scale your positive impact through the business model. If you’ve been tracking the field, you also know that it is far more difficult to put into practice than the theory suggests. How do you help the organisation cut through overwhelming opportunity to zero in on things that have a greater likelihood of success? (You don’t do it by going with the Chairman’s pet project or a blind guess.) One way is to see what is already finding traction in the broader ecosystem – your own and those of your peers. This puts tiresome sustainability report to very good use!

When creating a framework, we do this at a high level; when moving into sustainability ideation, we deepen the analysis into a more granular set of patterns that are specific to your organisation. We blend this approach with what Dave Snowden (of  The Cynefin Co) calls the ‘next right step’ approach to strategy. It recognises that complex systems are inherently unpredictable and that re-purposing existing assets and capabilities incurs less energy cost than investing in new ones. Given the scale of the sustainability challenge and the speed at which your competitors are moving, it makes sense optimise the energy you invest in this space.

5. Identify your strategic focus areas and describe them using heuristics

PEI pattern analysis highlights the broad areas where your organisation is more likely to scale its positive social/environmental impact. Cluster these into broad focus areas. Iterate and improve. Ideally end with three. These strategic focus areas will be enabled by several cross-cutting capabilities. (Think culture, innovation, tech, partnerships that will help you respond more quickly and increase your range of options.) Engage with your colleagues to identify which are the most important. To show alignment with the relevant SDGs, link them to the strategic focus areas: that’s where you are more likely to scale impact.

A few final suggestions:

• Build some flexibility into your focus areas. When we are not sure how we are going to make things happen, heuristics are more useful than goals. This flexibility doesn’t make you a laggard – it keeps you open to possibility.
• Your focus areas and the enablers that support them form a decision-making framework for the entire organisation – not a plan of action for the sustainability team.
• The framework should highlight where you need further analysis. You analysis will get more granular as you get more tangible. There will be a lot of things, but now you should be allocating energy with eyes nicely open.

That comes from my friend, film-maker and anthropologist Paul Myburgh, who taught me the bushman greeting Tsamkwa/tge? Are your eyes nicely open?).

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Banner photo: Flock of pigeons scattering by JJ Shev on Unsplash.