Sustainability Forever? Embedding sustainability in your ... - Ashridge

FEBRUARY 2012 

Sustainability 

forever? 

Embedding 

sustainability in 

your brand and 

culture 

Ashridge Business School http://www.ashridge.org.uk

IntRodUctIon 

If the company you work for was to have a tattoo, what would it say? 

Perhaps not a usual question, but worth considering for a moment – 

a tattoo is, after all, an expression of a person’s identity. 

Recent research by Ashridge Business School has found that 

successful change strategies for sustainability need to take 

into account an organisation’s identity. true sustainability 

is a product of a company’s culture, and evolves from it, 

as well as developing the culture in new directions. the first 

article introduces the ‘talik’, the model of change developed 

by Ashridge. 

SUStAInABILItY AS USUAL 

1 DIRECTIONS FEBRUARY 2012 SAlTERBAxTER 

In the second article, Lucinda Hensman of coca-cola 

Enterprises discusses the evolution of their new sustainability 

plan in relationship to the talik – a plan which both reflects 

the company culture and stretches it. Is your company ready 

to commit to sustainability forever – or where are you on the 

journey? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences on 

the subject. 

Alexandra Stubbings and Nicolas Ceasar, Co-heads of the Sustainability 

Practice at Ashridge Business School, introduce a major new piece 

of research on how organisations are embedding sustainability. 

Strategic alignment for embedding sustainability 

When it comes to change strategies for embedding 

sustainability, having a powerful brand is both a blessing 

and a curse. Instantly recognisable, coca-cola, Virgin or Apple 

evoke an immediate cluster of associations, and depending 

on whether you’re a customer, activist or investor those 

associations may have halos, horns or otherwise. Having a 

strong brand can confer a social licence to push boundaries 

on behalf of your stakeholders; but it can also limit the 

freedom to experiment and innovate. 

the importance of external brand to sustainability is well 

recognised. But what about internally? What’s the relationship 

between sustainability, brand and culture? If culture is 

‘the way we do things around here’ then arguably it needs 

to reflect the values and principles our brands espouse. In our 

increasingly boundaryless and hyper-connected world, where 

any discrepancy between intention and action can produce 

immediate accusations of greenwash across the twittersphere, 

alignment between brand and culture – the talk and the 

walk – is ever more vital. Unfortunately the fault-lines between 

them can be considerable and this is often where change 

strategies come unstuck. 

over the past year, Ashridge has conducted a major piece of 

research, reviewing 176 sustainability reports and interviewing 

practitioners from across 24 organisations who are leading 

Ashridge Business School http://www.ashridge.org.uk 

Olivia SPrinkel 

Senior Sustainability 

Consultant, Salterbaxter 

on embedding sustainability. We asked them for their stories 

of success and the role of culture in enabling and inhibiting 

change. As you would imagine we heard a lot of inspiring 

examples. But what differentiated the real pioneers was 

the intersection of brand, culture and how they are framing 

sustainability. Most significantly, the change strategies they 

employed took account (consciously or otherwise) of their 

organisation’s identity. 

In organisational change circles, ‘identity’ has historically 

been a poor cousin to culture. It’s more readily associated with 

marketing and image, but it is clearly much wider than that. 

organisational identity is a psychological phenomenon, as 

much about the unconscious and taken for granted sense 

of ‘who we are together’ as it is about the image we want 

to portray. organisational identity is where brand and culture 

meet. We express who we are – our values, culture, our 

strategic intent – through the labels we use to describe 

ourselves. We create impressions to the market through our 

products and services, our marketing and communications 

strategies. External stakeholders make sense of those 

messages and reflect back a revised image which is then made 

sense of internally and becomes embedded into the culture. 

Like two interacting feedback loops – one more externally 

focused, the other internally – this process of meaning making 

goes on all the time, whether we notice it or not.

How is this useful for embedding sustainability? 

Firstly, sustainability is still a contested and ill-defined concept. 

one organisation will frame the term using language borrowed 

from Quality and Lean processes (efficiency, waste reduction); 

another will borrow from risk management (mitigation, control, 

resilience). depending on the dominant identity labels, some 

frames will resonate and get traction faster than others. For 

Virgin, the challenger brand identity is a compelling one, and 

framing sustainability as ground breaking innovation, beating 

the competition, as adventure, reflects well the image staff have 

of their company. For coca-cola Enterprises, the youthful, 

fresh lifestyle identity will connect more readily with Gen Y and 

their desire for greater meaning and freedom in their work. 

connecting with stakeholders and employees through these 

common identity labels generates positivity and goodwill, 

enabling more stretching change strategies that have a greater 

chance of traction. 

Secondly, addressing the complex contextual issues that get 

bracketed as sustainability – material resource depletion, 

environmental degradation, social unrest, economic imbalance 

and so on – brings to the fore the deep-set values and beliefs 

from which our identities derive. this is more than a question 

of individual status (though that’s a considerable concern in 

itself). It’s about our collective self-worth. People don’t want 

to be villainised for their organisation’s corporate responsibility 

or environmental record. (How does it feel to be a BP employee 

right now?) We want to feel like the good guys and focusing on 

a positive environmental and social agenda builds positive 

personal and group ‘affect’. Unilever are seeing the benefit 

of this already in their employee engagement scores. When 

interviewed, they explained how the publication of their 

Sustainable Living Plan, and the whole organisation programme 

of change to deliver it, has boosted scores by double digit 

percentage points. More engaged employees equals higher 

performance and top-line revenues, and all this whilst 

decoupling growth from environmental impact. 


Identity then is a central concern in the development of a strategy 

for embedding sustainability. there were other ‘concerns’ 

too, specific to the sustainability agenda, such as designing 

values-led innovation strategies, leading joined-up technical 

and cultural change. the practitioners we spoke to are highly 

skilled and they’d learnt as they went along without a blueprint 

or roadmap. drawing on their examples, and from our own 

experience, we put together an integrated model of change 

that starts to address the distinctive concerns of sustainability. 

The talik: a model of change for the era of sustainability 

the ‘talik’ (named after naturally occurring positive feedback 

loop that keeps water liquid in the frozen tundra) is a model 

and theory of change intended to take account of: 

• the need for strategic alignment across a number of 

(potentially competing) internal and external stakeholder 

agendas 

• the need for high inclusion based organisational change 

processes that work with culture and identity (behaviour 

and values) as well as technical and structural change 

• the natural cycles of learning and adaptation that occur 

as an organisation responds to its context 

• the different starting points required by particular cultural 

conditions (placing emphasis on one or another dimension) 

• the importance of coherence and consistency throughout 

the change process 

• the central role of sense-making or meaning-making in bringing 

together these internal and external organisational aspects 

Each of the organisations interviewed showed a preference 

for one or another of the four ‘E’s’ and a way of framing 

sustainability from that angle. Some of the most progressive 

examples, such as Marks & Spencer’s Plan A and Unilever’s 

Sustainable Living Plan integrate them all. Each stage raises 

questions about who needs to be involved and what factors to 

address. In most circumstances engaging is the obvious place 

to start. But as an illustration, we can use Vodafone’s story 

of M-Pesa, the mobile payments platform launched in Kenya; 

a great example of an organisation working intuitively around 

the talik. In this instance we start the story with ‘expressing’ – 

the decision to launch a new service. 

Expressing 

Initially a match-funded initiative with department for Internal 

development (dfId), M-Pesa (Pesa is Swahili for money) 

was born out of the Sustainability function. the service and 

infrastructure was developed with partners on the ground. the 

offer reflected the values of Vodafone and although it was a 

project marginal to the mainstream business, it also stretched 

the self-identity of an organisation known as a ‘telecoms utility 

provider’ to consider itself a financial services provider too. 

DIRECTIONS FEBRUARY 2012 SAlTERBAxTER 2

organisations with strong expressing cultures tend to be 

market-led, have a powerful pioneering or entrepreneurial 

spirit, or are willing to experiment with values-based innovations. 

Examples from our research included InterfaceFlor, SAP, Skanska, 

Virgin, coca-cola Enterprises and Unilever. their identities are 

closely coupled to their brand image and strongly guarded. 

What are the products and services that reflect your 

sustainability values? Is your portfolio consistent or does 

it send mixed messages to your customers about what you 

value? What is the identity your portfolio portrays? 

ThE FOUR ‘E’S’ OF ThE TAlIk: 

e 

e 

encOding 

Redesigning 

systems 

& processes 

Internal 

experience – 

culture and 

energy 

enacting 

Aligning cultural 

practices 

ENCODINg 

Shifts in culture and behaviour, visibly embodying ethical stances, 

leads to determination to codify into everyday practice. this may be 

as subtle as a rewritten policy document or as transformational as 

redesigning the fundamental business model. From encoding new 

processes, plans, products, services are imagined, and the cycle 

goes around again. Key process owners from across the business, 

org design specialists, Procurement and customer facing 

functions will likely dominate here. 

ENACTINg 

As new meaning is made through on going discourse on purpose, 

strategy, identity, values, over time that new meaning is enacted 

through shifts in behaviour that collectively appear as culture 

change. Interventions at this point include disrupting fixed routines, 

strengthening informal communication channels, workshops, 

learning and leadership development, amplifying values and new 

norms through group sense-making, ideation and experimentation. 

Arguably responsibility for Enacting sits everywhere, though 

Learning & development, HR, R&d and operations may take the 

lion’s share. 


SENSE- 

mAkINg AND 

REFRAmINg 

Strategic realignment of 

identity purpose and values 


Engaging 

M-Pesa proved to be a surprising success for Vodafone. 

the ability to pay farm workers directly without lengthy 

and hazardous trips to the banks in town, remanding funds 

to doctors to care for sick relatives: with so many applications 

M-Pesa took off. With positive feedback from stakeholders, the 

sustainability team had no problem engaging further, internally 

and externally, and were able to expand the programme. 

Effective engagement is critical to embedding sustainability. 

Stakeholders mediate between an organisation and its 

engaging 

Sensitising to 

context 

External 

experience – 

reputation 

and brand 

exPreSSing 

Articulating external 

proposition 

e 

e 

ENgAgINg 

despite the best efforts of the espoused communications, 

stakeholders – customers, investors, suppliers, opinion formers – 

reflect back into the organisation their own impressions of the 

organisation’s activities. How these groups are engaged with and 

how those impressions are interpreted (or not) can have profound 

consequences – for emotional relationship and loyalty, for values, 

strategy and the abiding sense of purpose. Participative whole 

system processes can help here, enabling collective sense-making 

and building of social capital. Responsibility for ‘engaging’ is 

diffuse, though can involve Marketing, Strategy, Procurement, 

cSR, HR and specific Engagement functions. 

ExpRESSINg 

organisations express themselves through their espoused value 

proposition: products and physical artefacts – annual reports, 

adverts, logos, marketing collateral, built spaces – and services, 

customer interaction, partnerships and collaborations, PR, awards 

and surveys. Intentionally or not they are continually sending 

messages about their identity and values. Expressing is often the 

province of Marketing, Product design, communications, Retail.

context, amplifying weak signals that can become significant 

drivers of change. High-participation methods which get 

representation of the ‘whole system’ in the room, which enable 

novel conversation and idea generation across boundaries 

are ideal for this. commitments to experiments with new 

behaviours, values, products and processes emerge. 

organisations with strong engaging cultures tend to have flat 

hierarchies, loose networked structures and porous boundaries, 

making it easy to collaborate and build new partnerships. their 

identities are fluid and more ‘emergent’, with groups forming 

around specific intentions or projects (as the Vodafone M-Pesa 

team did) and then dissolving when the project is complete. 

Examples included British American tobacco and Rabobank. 

What is your relationship with your key stakeholders? (And that 

includes your employees!) How could you bring them more fully 

into your strategic thinking and ideation? Who are the ‘unusual 

suspects’ already undertaking experiments successfully and 

what can you learn from them? What social purpose might you 

collectively serve? 

Enacting 

through engagement and ideation, new intentions and 

behavioural options emerge. People are more willing to 

experiment with different behaviours if they see peers 

doing likewise, so-called ‘social proofing’. 

For Vodafone, as the success story of M-Pesa spread, not only 

did strategic decisions get made to expand and mainstream 

the ‘issue-led’ programme, but the attraction of being part 

of a positive social agenda led to more values-led innovative 

thinking and experimentation. 

Strong enacting cultures tend to be highly innovative and 

permissive of a wide range of behaviours and identities, 

enjoying novelty and learning like the ‘I owe You Project’ 

a fashion company that connects the maker and the wearer. 

they may have a long established eco-social awareness 

like John Lewis Partnership (‘It’s in our dnA’) or be highly 

relational in style like @oneAlliance, a collaboration 

of 7 partners delivering part of the Anglian Water 

investment programme. 

What are the ‘green shoots’ of behaviour change in your 

organisation that you could nurture? Where do you see the 

best expressions of ‘positive deviancy’? What norms and 

routines are inhibiting the transition to a more eco-socially 

aware culture? How could you unravel them? 

Encoding 

once the value of an issue-led approach was recognised, 

Vodafone began to roll out innovation workshops across other 

geographies. In India and Afghanistan they have run events with 

specialists and stakeholders on the ground to identify issues 

they have the competence to help address and design responses. 

Procedures to expand and formalise the M-Pesa service have 

brought the programme from the margins to the mainstream. 

Encoding change via the redesign of processes and systems is 

one of the most common methods of engendering change, but 

too often processes are designed in a vacuum and only have 

limited success. designing participatively, as Anglo-American, 

Adidas, natural England and HSBc are doing well, increases 

the ownership of the new processes. 

Which are the core processes and systems in your organisation? 

How could you redesign them participatively, and who would 

need to be involved? What structures – governance, policies, 

supply chain contracts – are impeding the embedding of new 

norms and values? 

Sense-making and Reframing 

At the heart of the talik is the often taken for granted work 

of making sense of the multitude of data and choosing what 

to act upon, spotting the areas of misalignment and designing 

responses. A strategic engagement event that brings together 

sufficient representation of all key stakeholder groups and 

process owners is one way to do this. over a couple of days you 

can work right around the talik and co-create a set of principles 

that can then inform consistent activity across the organisation. 

Just as different organisations frame sustainability in different 

ways, different departments and functions will do too. What 

attracts Marketing might turn off Procurement, and vice versa! 

the talik provides an integrative model for helping to surface 

and acknowledge many of the competing framings in use and 

provides a valuable step in getting to a shared language, a 

prerequisite for getting to the principles of strategic alignment. 

this isn’t to say that any of this is easy. disagreement amongst 

leaders, power asymmetries, territorial protectionism, and 

just simple unacknowledged habits and assumptions, all 

are quite capable of derailing any change strategy. But for 

embedding sustainability, a task that requires working on 

just about every front at once, having a template such as 

this one can certainly help. 

alexandra Stubbings and nicolas ceasar lead the Sustainability Practice 

at ashridge Business School where they teach, consult and coach at the 

intersection of sustainability, strategy and change. 

a cOPy Of the full rePOrt iS availaBle frOm: 

liz.ainslie@ashridge.org.uk 



cocA-coLA EntERPRISES’ SUStAInABILItY JoURnEY 

Lucinda Hensman, Associate Director, CRS Communications, 

spoke to Olivia Sprinkel, Salterbaxter, about Coca-Cola Enterprises’ 

(CCE) Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability (CRS) journey 

and how this can be related to Ashridge’s ‘talik’ model of change. 

In 2011, ccE launched its new Sustainability Plan, ‘deliver 

for today, inspire for tomorrow’. this marked a step change 

in corporate Responsibility and Sustainability (cRS) at ccE, 

setting out a new vision and framework and 37 new targets in 

seven focus areas. In particular, it expanded our accountability 

from within our four walls to our value chain. It’s interesting to 

reflect on the journey we have taken to get to this point, and 

how this can be described in terms of the talik. We’ve had times 

of intense internal focus, discussing new goals and targets, 

and times where our engagement has been predominantly 

external. over the last six or so years, we have been around 

the cycle a number of times as we have developed our culture 

of sustainability! 

From ‘Commitment 2020’ to our new Plan 

ENCODINg: Before 2005, we had a more philanthropic based 

approach to cRS, which we developed steadily, publishing 

our first cRS report in 2006 and setting out a vision to be 

the cRS leader in the coca-cola system in 2007. over the 

next few years, we ‘encoded’ cRS into the company, building 

sustainability into everyday business practices, and adding 

it into our ‘operating Framework’ which sets out our company 

vision and our strategic business priorities. We also developed 

robust cRS governance, forming a global cRS Advisory 

council, and calculated our company and product carbon 

footprints for the first time. 

ExpRESSINg: In early 2009, we held our first internal 

‘Environmental Summit’, to increase management engagement 

in cRS and to finalise ‘commitment 2020’, a series of aggressive, 

measurable goals with roadmaps across five focus areas. 

commitment 2020 gave us the basis from which we began to 

express our commitments and engage stakeholders externally. 

Later in the year we held our first global cRS in Action week, 

with all employees engaging in their communities, reinforcing 

our cRS message both internally and externally. We also held 

our first external stakeholder roundtable in 2010 to develop 

our water strategy. our work was recognized in newsweek’s 

first ever Green Rankings when we were ranked number 1 

in the Food and Beverage Industry. 


REFRAmINg, ENACTINg, ENCODINg: In october 2010, ccE 

sold its north American operations to the coca-cola company, 

becoming a European focused business. this was a period 

of intense internal enacting and encoding, in order to embed 

a new cRS identity and discourse and to drive alignment in 

cRS across the company. We worked to systematise our cRS 

reporting, formalise our steering groups and build new ways 

of working – developing ‘the ccE way’ for cRS. At the same 

time, we wanted to restate our sustainability commitments to 

European stakeholders, and set ourselves on a track towards a 

cRS leadership position within the entire food and beverage 

industry. We carried out a lengthy benchmarking exercise to 

determine what sustainability leadership would entail, and 

then drafted new commitments and targets internally. 

“We recognised 

that it was important 

for our plan to build 

on our strong culture 

of delivery, whilst 

also stretching us” 


“We have 

always been very 

clear that CRS is 

the responsibility 

of the whole 

business”

ExpRESSINg: In March 2011 we held a stakeholder roundtable, 

inviting thought leaders and nGos from across Europe to provide 

their feedback on our proposed commitments and targets. 

We heard key messages about how we needed to go further 

and be even more ambitious: 

“It will be important to identify the various elements in 

the value chain where greater sustainability is needed 

and the responsibilities of the companies involved.” 

“We’re talking about 2020 and what will be demanded 

of companies in 2020 is significantly greater than what 

is required today”. 

We took this feedback on board and set about developing 

our new sustainability plan, engaging both internally and 

externally, to determine a new vision, framework, commitments 

and targets. We recognised that it was important for our plan 

to build on our strong culture of delivery, whilst also stretching 

us to look beyond our own core business operations and take 

responsibility for impacts up and down our value chain. We 

also wanted to formalise our commitment to innovation. our 

vision is now expressed as ‘We will deliver for today, growing a 

low-carbon, zero-waste business, and inspire and lead change 

for a more sustainable tomorrow.’ 

We launched the Plan in September 2011, via a live, webcast 

debate discussing the challenges of building a sustainable 

supply chain, with key suppliers, customers and a wide range 

of thought leaders and nGos. We know that we cannot achieve 

the goals we have set for ourselves without their leadership 

and collaboration in the future. 

ENACTINg AND ENCODINg: It was a major milestone for us 

when John Brock, our chairman and cEo, launched the new 

plan internally in September 2011, at our Sidcup GB plant in a 

videocast to all our European employees. Since that moment, 

we have been working to embed the Plan into our business 

through new signage and communications so that our 

employees understand our ambitions and how they can 

help us to achieve them. We have also been ensuring that 

our governance, data systems and reporting support delivery 

of the strong goals and targets we have set. 

cRS has always had the support of our chairman and cEo and 

our Executive team, and we have benefited from their clear 

leadership in this area. But they have always been very clear 

that cRS is the responsibility of the whole business. Having 

colleagues coming together from across all areas of the 

business to drive change has been fundamental to the 

success of our journey to date. 

cRS at ccE will continue to evolve, as we learn more, engage 

more and our employees rise to the challenge to deliver, lead 

and innovate more across all our areas of our business. It is 

certainly true in our experience that sustainability is a journey, 

not a destination! 

read mOre aBOut cce’S SuStainaBility Plan at: 

www.ccesustainabilityplan.com 


lucinda henSman 

Associate Director, 

CRS Communications 

Serving 170 million people across seven countries in Western Europe – Great Britain, 

France, Belgium, netherlands, Luxembourg, norway and Sweden – coca-cola 

Enterprises is one of the world’s largest bottlers of coca-cola beverages. 

Salterbaxter worked with ccE on helping to develop the new sustainability plan 

and creating the launch communications. 


ABoUt SALtERBAxtER 

Salterbaxter brings a unique blend 

of skills to helping businesses 

address sustainability. 

The key driver of our work is to 

deliver ‘Ideas for Better Business’. 

We help organisations develop and implement ideas that 

add value to their business because they add value to society. 

We do this through bringing together expertise in strategy, 

sustainability and creative communications. this encompasses: 

• helping define vision, strategy and positioning 

to provide clear direction; 

• developing creative, innovative communications 

to encourage engagement; 

• integrating frameworks, targets and processes 

to drive ambitious performance. 

coMMUnIcAtIonS 

And EnGAGEMEnt 

contAct US: 

StRAtEGY 

Ideas 

for 

better 

business 

olivia Sprinkel 

Senior Sustainability consultant 

osprinkel@salterbaxter.com 

Louise dudley-Williams 

Business development Manager 

ldudleywilliams@salterbaxter.com 

tel +44 (0)20 7229 5720 

www.salterbaxter.com 

www.twitter.com/salterbaxter 

SUStAInABILItY 


OUR ClIENTS 

We work with many leading multinationals across Europe 

and Scandinavia. We also have in-depth experience of working 

in Africa and Latin America. our clients include: 

Adidas Group 

Anglo American 

A P Møller-Maersk 

ArcelorMittal 

Bacardi 

BAE Systems 

BSkyB 

Bupa 

capital one 

carlsberg Group 

carphone Warehouse 

clarks 

coca-cola Enterprises 

de Beers 

dMGt 

E.on UK 

Europeana 

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H&M 

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Millicom International (tigo) 

Morrisons 

Provident Financial 

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Reckitt Benckiser 

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Rolls-Royce 

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Sustainability Forever? Embedding sustainability in your ... - Ashridge

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