A chance to test your maturity…

Last month I said that sustainable business was in its teenage years. Now comes a sign that things are formalising, and a chance to find how mature your organisation is through the Green Strategy Benchmark Survey.

Teenagers tend to know who is top of the pecking order, and are keen – desperate? – to copy so they can be at the top too. The same is true for ambitious companies and sustainability. We know that PepsiCo and M&S, for instance, are ahead of the pack. But how did they get there, and what can you copy?

The folks at Green Monday think they know the main components, and are asking for people to fill in a 15-minute Green Strategy Benchmark Survey. Participants will get a customised report telling them their stage, the level of disruption in their sector and how advanced they are against 15 areas, such as CEO commitment and whether sustainability is mentioned in their annual report. (Also, there are discounted tickets and even the chance of free entry.)

Forum is a partner of the Green Strategy conference. Jonathon Porritt is a keynote speaker; Martin Wright and I will be chairing parts of the day. We’re doing so because we see the event as a way to accelerate the ‘teenage years’. Now, most conferences are PowerPoint wars and the only thing they accelerate is boredom. With a little luck, Green Strategy’s event will be different because they’re trying to harness the wisdom of the crowds. They’ll be able to use the survey and the format of the event to crystalise good practice and diffuse it to the attending companies.

This is exactly what we think is needed in sustainable business. As part of understanding how to do system innovation, we developed The Six Steps to Significant Change. Lots of stuff in sustainable business is at the end of stage three – we have lots of pioneering practice (Plan A, Ecomagination and so on). What we need to do now is enable the tipping point, to make it easy for ‘fast followers’ and then mass adopters to take on sustainable business practices until it becomes normal. Green Strategy’s GREENPRINT framework and the conference are an attempt to do exactly that. Which is excellent.

Now, it might turn out that this particular attempt is flawed in some way. And, what is crystalised in these sorts of things is established practices (or rather, practices that are well established in at least a few leaders). No company can really be a leader by only copying good practice. There is always the next thing to explore, and that can’t be captured easily by surveys. This is where there is true leadership from companies (and, incidentally, where we at Forum tend to operate).

But teenagers need to experiment in order to mature. This conference is a sign of what the field of sustainable business is trying to learn. Good luck to it.