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

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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. 3 DIRECTIONS FEBRUARY 2012 SAlTERBAxTER SENSE- mAkINg AND REFRAmINg Strategic realignment of identity purpose and values Ashridge Business School http://www.ashridge.org.uk 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 Ashridge Business School http://www.ashridge.org.uk DIRECTIONS FEBRUARY 2012 SAlTERBAxTER 4
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