How can companies turn the challenges of sustainable development into commercial opportunities? This is the focus of our work with companies on their business strategy. We aim to enable all businesses to put sustainability at the heart of their strategy by inspiring them with real examples and turning our experiences into tools they can use.

Global issues frame the business context in the 21st century, and any good business strategy must answer some fundamental questions: how will this company be successful in a world dealing with climate change, with resource constraints, an increasing population and a growing expectation that business will be part of the solution?

Forward-looking business leaders are asking “what should our business strategy be, in the light of sustainability?” Answering this question enables companies to find commercial opportunities that can help them be successful in the future. It is a far more powerful question than “what should our CSR strategy be?”: this will always give a weak business case because it frames answers in the context of risk management, philanthropy and compliance.

"Forum for the Future did a great job helping to generate real momentum behind Guardian Media Group's sustainability programme. We needed to have a coherent approach that was commercial, focused and worked for a diverse group of companies, and that enabled GMG to make a real difference. Forum were supportive in working with the internal team to deliver a vision and strategy, and sustainability is now an integral part of our wider business strategy." - Carolyn McCall, former CEO, Guardian Media Group

Our work

We have a long track record of working with companies on what sustainability means for their business. Over the last few years we have created a modular approach to helping companies go through the different stages of planning a strategy.

External assessment - We help companies understand their changing business context using futures techniques, such as company-specific scenarios (for instance with PepsiCo and Finlays), existing scenarios (see Acting Now for a Positive 2018), and horizon-scanning (Balfour Beatty, Royal and Sun Alliance).

Internal assessment - We enable companies to understand their strengths and weaknesses by benchmarking their capabilities against their peers using our Leader Business Hallmarks. These are distilled from our experience helping more than a hundred companies operate in a more socially, environmentally and financially sustainable way, combined with sector-specific desk research.

Visioning - We assist companies in setting their strategic end-goals using visioning. Wessex Water’s sustainability vision is based on our Five Capitals, framework of understanding sustainable development, and came from engaging with a wide range of stakeholders inside and outside the company. We carried out extensive sector research and held workshops with the executive board at Guardian News & Media to build consensus around a vision for the company.

Option generation - We help companies identify many ways to use their capabilities to best effect and achieve their vision, using innovation techniques. We have identified 11 types of business strategy for sustainability (see Leader Business Strategies) which we use as a starting point for creating different options for each company.

Option selection – We then enable companies to choose the best strategy for them by evaluating the different options. The Better Decisions, Real Value project is developing a range of financial techniques to support option selection.

Implementation – We help companies implement their plans and visions, offering support in a range of areas including governance, training and communications.

We can help businesses put sustainability into strategy in many ways.

• We can run a stand-alone pilot, to demonstrate to senior decision-makers that sustainability needs to be treated as a material business issue - see PepsiCo case study. 
• We can feed analysis into the regular planning cycle, such as scenarios, a vision, key risks and opportunities,  so that decision-makers take sustainability into account – see Finlays case study.
• We can run a full strategic planning process, so that the organisation has a strategy fit for the future.

Find out more about the business strategy services we offer organisations.

Find out more about our recession planning services.

News

Five of our leading blue-chip partners have begun testing financial techniques designed to make the business case for sustainability as part of the Better Decisions, Real Value project. We will use these pilots to improve the techniques and plan to publish them early in 2010.

We are also mid-way through creating a vision and strategy with Guardian Media Group, which owns Guardian News & Media.

Contact: David Bent