6 Steps to Sustainability

It is becoming standard practice to create a business sustainability plan and report. About 75 percent of the largest corporations currently utilize one and the trend is accelerating. Increasingly, investors, customers and regulators want to see genuine progress on these issues.

Having something credible to report requires more than a haphazard approach. Without a thoughtful sustainability plan, you may miss out on important opportunities or be accused of doing window dressing.

In essence, a sustainability plan answers two basic questions: one, should we pursue sustainability and, two, if so, what does it mean we should do? The steps below will assure your plan maps out a clear course, while providing credible data to report on your efforts.

The Six Steps

1) Establish the business case for pursuing sustainability.
For your effort itself to be sustainable, you need a clear business reason for doing it. Pursuing sustainability because “it’s the right thing to do” may be enough to start your plan, but eventually you need to get to the place where sustainability is not just nice to have, but core to your long-term success. At some point, your executives have to be able to explain why this is worth the time, expense and effort. This part of the plan involves developing a cogent response to the following questions:
• What about sustainability makes sense for us?
• What pressures are pushing us to do it?
• What opportunities does it present?
• Are certain issues within sustainability particularly relevant (e.g., climate change, e-waste, international labor standards)?
• How does sustainability relate to other organizational
initiatives (e.g., lean manufacturing, environmental management systems)?

2) Choose a sustainability framework (or create a hybrid) to develop a vision for sustainability.
Begin by defining sustainability in meaningful and actionable terms. Ask, “What would we be doing or not doing if we were completely sustainable?” While there are dozens of frameworks, many use a definition that combines the “Triple Bottom Line” (economic, social and environmental considerations) with the system conditions of “The Natural Step,” which defines social and environmental end points.

3) Conduct an impacts assessment to ascertain the gap between the current state and the vision. 
Once you are clear about where you are going, take stock of how close or far you are from that vision. This “impacts assessment” examines what you take from the environment and society, what you do with what you take, and what you contribute in the end to the environment, society and your industry. Use Fig. 2 to facilitate this assessment, filling in each box with your major processes and materials. Then examine each box in light of the chosen sustainability framework to identify where you are out of step with your vision.

4) Identify a set of metrics to define the fully sustainable end point, gather baseline data on your current state and begin tracking your progress. A robust set of metrics is a powerful tool to focus attention and generate feedback. Metrics help track your progress and celebrate successes. But you can go overboard with metrics, too. When developing your sustainability control panel, keep these tips in mind:
• Ensure a balanced set of metrics. What gets measured tends to get done, but sometimes at the expense of things you forgot to measure. Be sure your set of metrics is not setting you up to trade one problem for another.
• Measure at the right scale. If you set metrics on too small a scale, you encourage inappropriate competition when you need cooperation. Alternatively, if you measure at too large a scale, people will not feel they can affect outcome.
• Limit the number of metrics needing attention at any one time. People can not pay attention to 20 metrics or goals, so narrow them down to a handful.
• Combine leading and lagging metrics. Lagging metrics measure things in the past. Leading metrics
help predict the future. Energy use is a lagging metric, but investment in energy conservation is a leading indicator.

5) Develop an implementation strategy and identify projects that help reach the sustainable state.
Begin with your vision and ask what it implies you will be doing in that future. This involves identifying, prioritizing, scheduling and strategizing action steps to move toward your vision. Backcasting is a common approach for conducting this planning step. Begin with your vision to ask what you should be doing in the future. Then work backward over a 20-year timeline, asking at critical milestones what you need to do to achieve the target for each succeeding milestone. You can use criteria meaningful to your organization to prioritize these actions.

6) Build the support systems necessary to achieve your plan.
When you implement sustainability or any other corporate initiative, you need a way of setting priorities, monitoring progress and reviewing overall success. This process is often referred to as a management system. Most management systems are built on the time-honored “Plan-Do-Check-Act” cycle. Your management system should monitor and coordinate individual projects as well as overall implementation of your whole sustainability program.

There is too much at stake to approach sustainability without a thoughtful plan of action. This six-step approach leaves plenty of room to tailor your plan to your organization, while still assuring all key considerations are addressed. A comprehensive plan based on these steps ensures your energies are efficiently spent, your claims verifiable and your progress meaningful.

NOTE: This article is adapted from the book, Hitchcock, D. and Willard, M. (2008). “The Step-by-Step Guide to Sustainability Planning.” London: Earthscan

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