Sustainability offers solutions to the pressures facing businesses. It offers the means to ensure that the consequences of our decisions are positive, value-adding ones. Ways in which businesses can use sustainability to become stronger include:
Cut carbon to cut cost
Use new technologies to enhance performance
With increasing frequency, technological innovations emerge that enable the creation of new customer services or radical alternatives to conventional solutions – for example by increasing the capacity, service life or safety of existing assets. The challenges are in accepting the new, understanding the potential threats and opportunities, determining how and when to invest, managing the risks, and communicating with staff and clients to bring about behavioural and cultural changes that enable the full potential of the technology to be realised. Read about our role in technology, strategy and design.
Understand your vulnerabilities
To meet the needs of a growing and more demanding population, delivering ever better service quality and reliability at an affordable price, infrastructure systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and interdependent. Our changing climate is placing unprecedented strain on infrastructure. To minimise risk of cascade failures and profound business disruption, it is vital to understand vulnerabilities and interconnections, protect where it is cost-effective to do so and, where you can’t, plan to fail safely and recover quickly. Assuring business and service continuity in the face of climate change requires new cross-disciplinary, inter-company and inter-agency relationships to be built.
Develop stronger schemes by adding social and economic value
Creating opportunities for and access to employment, entrepreneurialism and trade, healthcare and education, travel and leisure; stimulating local regeneration and economic growth; promoting safety, health and wellbeing – these are some of the measures of value that are being used alongside traditional cost-benefit assessment criteria. Capturing this value can dramatically alter public attitudes and investment decisions, unlocking funding that would conventionally be denied. Modifying scheme designs or business plans to deliver enhanced social and economic value is frequently cost-neutral or cost saving.
Why aren’t more companies doing these things?
Sustainability pushes us out of our comfort zone, requiring critical self-analysis and integrated thinking. It challenges the status quo and requires future scenario planning – something that our industry is not good at. Driving sustainability to strengthen a business can involve difficult decision-making, not always based on evidence but often on gut-instinct. Visionary leadership is needed at the top an organisation to empower new thinking from individuals within it.
Some business have contributed the following wisdom:
Scrutinise why you do things, not just what and how. Be clear what your core values are and be consistent in all you do, right the way through your supply chain. That contributes to a level of integrity that makes your services or products more desirable to customers, helps you attract and retain talent, encourages the best suppliers to work with you, improves efficiency and reduces cost. Ultimately it increases your market share because people will like what you do.
Set audacious goals. Companies that have used sustainability to achieve the most dramatic business improvements are those that have shaken free of ‘current’ thinking and set radical goals. Instead of asking ‘what do we think we can achieve’, they ask ‘what would we like to achieve?’ They then create simple, transparent means of measuring performance, incentivise dramatic outperformance, and fairly share risk to encourage innovation.
Challenge your supply chain. Sustainability isn’t a top-down thing. Every product or service supplier is a ‘R&D centre’ and a potential provider of innovations that will add efficiency. Specify the outcomes you want to achieve, not processes you want to follow or the details you expect in your design. Set ambitious goals, then empower your supply chain to pursue them, providing reward for doing so. Integrate the supply chain in your strategy and delivery model. Occasionally value is gained in spectacular leaps, but incremental innovations are equally important in changing the game.
Integrate sustainability into business strategy and execution. Sustainability is all about integrated thinking – opportunities, interconnections, risks, solutions, impacts. It improves efficiency, productivity and value. It supports and enhances the governance systems most companies have in place. Organisations that have used it to strengthen their businesses have aligned their values, mission and goals with sustainability.
Use sustainability to enhance market credibility. Investors look for transparency and responsibility in the way companies are managed. Sustainability is an indicator of good stewardship. Companies that score high for sustainability outperform those that score low – they achieve better growth and profitability – and can borrow capital on better terms. Sustainability is therefore something that every CFO should embrace.