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The Sustainability Triad
9 August 2024

If sustainability is happening in your company, you can probably depict its role as a triad. (Triads are not just convenient triangles – here’s a snippet of history from others who have worked long and hard to present things in abject simplicity.)

I tested my triad earlier this week with a decidedly high-powered exec team, and it worked. That’s my primary test because, after a few decades of failed sustainability definitions, I know that how we present it to smart, cynical people who actually care matters. A lot.

 

 

It should be self-explanatory but my key take-outs on the triad are:

Sustainability can be usefully depicted as a set of vectors (i.e. things that have magnitude and direction).

This doesn’t mean that targets and norms don’t count, it just means there’s a higher-level theory of change that is going to take precedence. #vectorTOC

Sustainability does not consist of one vector, but three that inherently intersect.

Companies work on all three, simultaneously, with varying degrees of consciousness.

  • Almost all of them are trying to ‘do less bad’ because this vector is driven by explicit expectations. Think SDGs, ESG, CDP, and other acronyms.
  • Some are consciously trying to ‘do more good’ but the majority are struggling to scale the good part. Doing good is easy when we can fund it with a small fraction of net profit after tax. Once we get beyond philanthropy, we hit barriers to scale because our efforts slice into the externalities that drive the profit formula. This happens despite the win-win paradigm and sometimes even because of it. (One reason for this is that companies love the concept and can keep using names like ‘circular’ and ‘shared value’ even after their efforts have demonstrably failed to scale.)
  • Very few companies are getting their heads around how to ‘grow their resilience’. There are various reasons for this. Firstly, it is more complex than the other two. Secondly, direction is far from obvious at the outset. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, it requires working with something that is anathema to much of Western thought: paradox. Our most sincere efforts often turn back to bite us.

After 50 years of commitment to sustainable development, the vectors that matter are still accelerating in the wrong direction. The main reason, I think, is that we are really, really bad at doing all three at the same time. Unfortunately, we don’t have a choice on that part.

Far from despondent, and despite being less naive, I feel more hopeful than ever. We are starting to ride the current waves of urgency (which is likely to outlast the others) and people are developing new tools that are simple to use and tangibly making better decisions and actions more possible. That is part of what makes us people. We have a long legacy of getting it right, despite the fact that we have never managed to cross the chasm at this scale before.

Where would you position your company’s sustainability efforts on this triad? It’s fractal, so you can use it at any level.

This is obviously setting things up for deploying SenseMaker® in the sustainability space. I’ve been waiting for nearly three years to get going on this and it’s finally about to happen. I will keep you posted.

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Banner picture cropped from a photo by Dušan veverkolog on Unsplash

 

 

 

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