Setting a strategic agenda for sustainable development:
Visualizing a sustainable way forward for our business, organization, city, neighborhood etcetera is not always an easy task. The variety of tools, methods, concepts, and best practice examples available to inspire us and to shape our contributions to sustainable development are daunting.
There are important questions to be addressed, first, before getting into the what and how of your sustainability aspirations:
▪︎ What future do we want?
▪︎ For whom?
▪︎ What particulars do we agree on with our stakeholders?
Without a concrete vision of the future we want, it will be challenging to decide on what action to take, how to go about, plan any intermediary steps to take, whom to assign responsibilities to or what tools and processes need to be acquired or developed. And it will be more difficult to mobilize others to support the cause and agree about the intended future direction and how to get there.
Of course, the number of possible answers to these questions is infinite. Finding the solutions may require ample dialogue between stakeholders.
Bringing sustainability into the vision of the future With a sketch of the desired future that you and your main stakeholders can agree on at hand, when can we validly call the end state we see as ideal for us as sustainable or contributing to sustainable development? Here, the challenge is not so much answering the above-mentioned strategic questions in an ambitious or even utopian way. We all know how to do that.
A challenge is also to validly set the minimum threshold of an ambitioned future: what do we need to do as a minimum for our actions to have net progress towards sustainability for our societies?
Sustainability is a matter of enabling or impairing our future generations of people to have a better life. Therefore, sustainability proposals that imply liabilities of future generations would render a sustainability strategy trivial and perhaps even misleading. Such an approach cannot be called a sustainability strategy.
A simple sustainability strategy test
So how can we check our future vision for real sustainability potential?
Below I present the questions that give us a first indication of whether our ambitioned future genuinely contributes to sustainable development.
Try to answer them by 'Yes' or 'No'. If the answer is 'No', it is best to go back to the drawing board and think more and deeper since you are not there yet.
If the answer is 'Yes', then go on to the next questions. If 'No', repeat the procedure mentioned above.
So here are the questions.
• Social impact - Will the future I envisage at least maintained or increase social benefits for my organization, stakeholders, their communities and society at large?
• Knowledge impact - Is my strategy going to increase the level of knowledge, skills and cooperation of my organization, stakeholders and their communities beyond what is needed to maintain their inclusion in a social and economic sense?
• Ecosystem impact - Will my strategy at least maintain or improve the net quality of the ecological environment (soil, air, water, ecosystem services, the biodiversity of ecosystems and species, pollution, effluents) of my stakeholders and their communities, without destroying those values for other others? Will I contribute to aggravating the effects of climate change or biodiversity loss?
• Natural resources and minerals - Will I diminish or eliminate the depletion of natural resources and do I restore or give back to the Commons everything that I took from the Commons to fulfil my business purpose and strategy?
• Economic impact - Do I contribute to the financial sustainability of my organization and diminish or eliminate economic costs for my stakeholders and their communities and societies at large?
•Structural impact - Will I structurally improve my organization's capability to increase the positive impact and to reduce adverse effects?
Our ambitions and plans are sustainable if all questions take 'Yes' for an answer. Perhaps this way of putting it may feel as introducing a subjective criterion to decide whether a strategy is likely to contribute to sustainable development.
However, it does not seem a tenable position for me to accept an organizational strategy as sustainable that produces some net positive impacts while generating or sustaining some negative implications at the same time. Sustainability is more than a net balance impact of positive and negative effects.
For example, positive social impacts cannot by themselves justify negative environmental impacts coming from the same organizational strategy and operations.
Social, environmental and intellectual values, or capitals as they are sometimes called theses days, are stocks of different kinds, scale and quality. They cannot and should not be compared on a one-dimensional scale only.
The dimensions, aspects, pillars, capitals or whatever names we would like to distinguish different values by cannot hide the fact that the world is one and whole and human and organizational impacts are as well.
Against that backdrop, organizations with only a sustainability ambition and strategy regarding social values are falling short from a sustainable development perspective.
And the same goes for organizations only factoring in environmental considerations, but not their social impacts. In practice, such a strategy may imply that the very organization is not yet able to see and discuss itself with a 360-degree view and face the truth on all of its impacts.
It may well be that internal taboos make it difficult to discuss the environmental or social impacts and values it produces.
The same goes for organizations that build their sustainability strategy based on a limited set of themes or objectives. They as well are, for whatever reason, not able to look at their full impacts.
Instead, they focus on a limited set of themes and impacts, which may fuel organizational narratives implying the whole organization and its business model is sustainable.
Concluding remarks:
Above, we have essentially added new components or "patterns" to sustainable development.
To create an approach to sustainable development, we need to develop a vision of the future that explains what values the organization it is going to deliver to its stakeholders and society at large, and that stakeholders and affected people find acceptable. The purpose and vision behind where the organization wants to go need to be explicit.
Whereas establishing our purpose and vision has virtually no limits to our imagination, we should be conscious of taking a 360-degrees view towards all of the organizational impacts and set minimum threshold levels that count as net positive contributions to sustainable development. Doing so will guarantee the organization's social license to operate.
From a sustainable development perspective, it does not make sense to narrow down the strategic contribution of an organization to a limited set of impacts or contributions. Positive impact needs to be demonstrated in all areas of influence, be they related to social, human, environmental, governance values.
Also, an accurate evaluation of an organization's contribution to sustainable development is only meaningful if it addresses the impacts on the commons: stocks of ecosystems and ecosystem services, common lands and fisheries, physical space available, access to food, knowledge to be able to evaluate impacts of strategies fully and to assess the effects on future generations etcetera. The impacts on the commons are still underspecified aspects of future organizational visions. They deserve more thinking and research.