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

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