Sustainable Business magazine - essential reading for sustainability professionals
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/137958
Interview Sally Uren, Forum for the Future 3/3 economies offers real opportunities for business to demonstrate a sense of purpose beyond the bottom line. But trust issues around social messaging are not to be underestimated, Uren cautions. "We are doing a lot of work in this area at the moment – we are asking businesses what is your purpose, what are you here for? If your purpose is clear, then communicating this becomes straightforward. Once you have this clarity, then you can look at optimising this value through your goods or services," she explains. Storytelling, she adds, will become a very powerful ingredient in the social value mix. "The mistake we have made with sustainability is that we haven't broken it down into meaningful chunks for people, it's still too complicated. Stories can break this down into meaningful messages around saving money, eating healthy food, supporting local farmers and communities, for example." Perhaps the one mega-trend keeping most sustainability managers awake at night is disruptive innovation. By its very nature, these disruptive forces come from outside of the business – usually from a new company entering a sector with little to lose and shaking it up with a breakthrough approach. Companies such as Amazon, Google and Apple are all good examples, forcing traditional players to re-think their entire business propositions. By and large, Uren believes that big corporations don't readily have the skill set to disrupt, but instead should examine how they can capitalise on opportunities when such disruption does happen. Here Forum for the Future is encouraging sustainability managers to understand the different time horizons at play – present, near term, and future – and how their company's operating context looks, or might look, within those scenarios. They can then start to develop plans and policies to address each horizon. 'What many successful businesses do, is they are able to surf these three horizons concurrently," says Uren. "This is a really important feature of the systems thinker, the ability to hold different time horizons in your mind. Systems thinkers are really good at looking longterm, but then bringing that back to the short-term. You need to know what is happening in the far future because that will underpin the long-term value creation of the business." Uren points to Levi's as a case in point – the company saw a future threat around water scarcity and last year launched its waterless jeans range, by engineering a production technique that uses less water in the finishing process to help conserve it. Levi's has already saved more than 172 million litres of water as a result of this initiative. These system-thinking skills will be critical going forward, Uren predicts, especially as companies begin to understand the complexity of sustainability – its global, environmental and social interconnectivity – and how one wrong decision can have all sorts of unintended consequences. "A solution that works for carbon might not work for water," she points out. "The key is having a clear vision, which should be based on the materiality of your direct and indirect impacts – and a roadmap on how to get there." The roadmap itself may not be necessarily well signposted, but, argues Uren, that is a good thing; the most ambitious sustainability visionaries are often honest in their assessments that the true path to value creation remains unknown.