If the decision is made to become more focused on “being sustainable”, drastic shifts in direction will undoubtedly occur.

The shift from that fear of being disrupted due to the digital transformation is being replaced by the need to build a sustainable company built on increasing insight and connected understanding, seeking and exploring, experimenting and confirming a new value equation.

A huge mental mindset needs to make leaps of faith and adjustments to this new order of focus.

That set of decisions will require a dedicated, focused, systematic need to assess the portfolio and the operating conditions. This goes way beyond the present “where to play and how to win”; this becomes as much for the long game as managing the short term.

The four focus points for Sustainability

The focus is on undertaking and shaping a new core through four focus points;

a new set of strategic choices, evaluating both product and operation reinvention, and fourthly, re-evaluating your innovative partnerships within a new Sustainability ecosystem design.

To embrace sustainability, you embrace a new set of principles of governance that bring the planet, people and prosperity far more into the thinking.

How do you assess if your current business portfolio is sustainability proof of not just what is required or needed for today but also in the future? What would that mean in the magnitude of change? Different scenario thinking needs a constant mindset and evaluation.

The argument is to envision today going forward and the future working back for framing the different scenarios.

Each of these different approaches to framing future challenges requires different thinking. The two perspectives, predicting forward, working back, give insights into alternative positions and build out required milestones for the next 5,10, and 20 years can have very different outcomes.

Investing time in deep, thoughtful evaluations of how and where sustainability fits bring impact and the substance becomes critical.

To begin to think through any sustainable journey, you need to consider:

Begin to ask the harder questions

You may not have answers but asking the bigger questions enables you to open up thinking, reflect, reconsider and revise opinions. Where does our business fit within and alongside society, both in who we serve and society in general, coupled with realising that the planet is heading towards a critical crisis, and what can we do to reduce these pressures?

Driving behaviour change towards a sustainable culture is paramount.

The nature of behaviour changes in collaborations, in working conditions, in health and safety concerns. The need for ongoing social and environmental risk screening becomes central to monitor and report upon constantly. How are you driving down power consumption, achieving net-positive impacts, and changing behaviours?

Strengthening and invigorating innovation partnerships.

The whole urgency of collaborating has grown and given the importance of managing through ecosystems and platforms where parties can manage and share. Developing the capabilities and competencies to address sustainability issues needs a new open, collaborative mindset. The push for establishing robust sustainability ecosystems will be relevant within the new core to manage the business differently.

The assessment of the current business and what can change

To embrace sustainability requires a no-holds-barred assessment of the present business and what is required in resources, shifts in strategic design and stakeholder dialogue. The journey does need a robust level of quantifying the disruption, for not just better-informed decisions, based on fact-based our best assumptions. Any journey like this needs to commit to moving forward, learning, pivoting where needed, recognizing what and why that has been seen and understood, and re-affirming the moving forward again in approaches.

The human challenge and seeing capital in broader senses

To become aware of sustainability at the core of business design, it needs developing groups of sustainability talent, more mission-driven, not just commercially focused. The importance of natural capital and social capital comes “alongside” financial considerations.

Sustainability is critically important. It needs this ecosystem and future innovating perspective as it is a combined effort, the gathering point that we all need to relate to and focus upon.

The recognition of sustainability is well beyond just one company

Firstly, the bigger picture of what you need to achieve must always be factored in to protect and support the ecosystems we need to nurture and grow; firstly, appreciating natures capital, and secondly, constantly paying attention to our actions on the climate and decarbonization, I outlined some initial thoughts in this recent post, “Looking beyond ESG”.

Secondly, we need to achieve far better consistency in Sustainability reporting. Many of the reports you work through are attractively presented but lack the real depth I feel this reporting needs. Thankfully there is a significant move towards a comprehensive corporate reporting system that integrates sustainability reporting with mainstream financial disclosures. I discuss this in a post that focuses on a business, building “Sustainable Value Creation”.

Be careful of your core metrics- they liberate but also can constrain.

Shed your past mindset on measurements. Sustainability is not determining core metrics and disclosures that become set in stone. They can keep you strapped in a straight jacket of reinforcing metrics and not fully appreciating the materiality need, searching for the information and insights that are important, relevant and /or critical to long-term value creation. We need to recognize that materiality is a dynamic concept, meaning issues considered relevant to one focus aspect can rapidly shift to different materiality. We need to be agile and react if the impact applied can be wrong and needs adjusting. Recognize it and then adjust and fix it.

Finally, embracing the world of intersections.

Sustainable Value Creation (the rationale for taking this journey) lies at the intersection of social and corporate values. That suggests that sustainability needs to be the new growth core; it embraces sustainability as a new direction of travel. Embrace all the intersections, seek out the networks and relationships that will bring fresh insights, open up your thinking but also challenge so much of our present “closed down” thinking.

Again, I raise this point in summary: To embrace sustainability, you embrace a new set of principles of governance that bring the planet, people and prosperity far more into the thinking. What would that mean in the magnitude of change?