A common sense approach to knowing your impacts

We can only make good and right decisions if we know everything. We need detailed scientific measurement like life-cycle analysis data to know where the key sustainability impact areas are for any product, business or service. And only if we’re absolutely sure about all impacts can we make the best decision.

This accepted wisdom puts barriers in many great brains and blocks the development of new approaches everywhere, especially in product and service development.

Now, we at Forum for the Future are big advocates of all things measurable. They help pin down the difficult beast that is sustainability. We have a workable definition for where we want to be ("meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”). But how do we know when we get there? And how do we even know that we are heading in the right direction, and fast enough? Measurement helps people to set a course and answer these questions. It brings sustainability to life, makes it real, touchable and manageable.

So far so good. So here it comes: we don’t think that all solutions and new developments have to be based on detailed measurement.

This is why many of our measurement solutions are based on the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80-20 rule. In essence, the Principle says that 20% of something is always responsible for 80% of a related result. This means that any input into something doesn’t equal its output, that most things in life are not distributed evenly. And who hasn’t muttered “Life isn’t fair” at some point. The early 20th century original Pareto Principle focused on unequal wealth distribution; since then it has been established in other realms. This is probably due to the fact that many have realised the benefits of focusing on the 20% that really make a difference.

I often get asked what we at the Forum do in our metrics work. It is exactly that: we develop measurement systems that help people to understand and talk about what is important and, if used well, to speed up innovation. And yes, of course we base our measurements on detailed scientific analysis, including life-cycle data. We just trim this detailed information so people can use it to guide genuinely new approaches instead of getting bogged down in the detail.

And thank Pareto for that.

Find out more about our metrics approach and projects.