Grappling with implementing a sustainability project or strategy? These four steps are what Sir Alex Ferguson might suggest, based on his experience of the ruthless competition that is the beautiful game.

All right, you may not eyeball your competition for 90 minutes every week like Manchester United. But your opponents will be just as determined to outperform you, and sustainability improvements are a key means to differentiate themselves.

So how can you move further and faster than your opponents?

1. Identify your key players

Assuming you have an agreed strategy or project, who are your Rooneys and Ferdinands?  Who will make or break the performance and who do others look to for leadership?  In organisations it’s often influential middle and senior managers who determine the success of a strategy.  It’s therefore vital you know who yours are.

2. Agree on tactics

Are you playing a 4-4-2 long ball game or 4-2-4 possession football?  Involve your key players in deciding the tactics you’ll use to deliver the strategy.  By doing this, you benefit from their experience and insight, and ensure they are committed to the tactics. 

Many organisations fall into the trap of jumping from strategic goals straight to implementing specific projects or initiatives without deciding on the best tactical approach.  For example, you may have   a strategic goal  to become carbon neutral, but how will you do that?  Will you focus on energy efficiency, renewable energy, offsetting or a combination of all three?  Each of these is a tactical response.  You need to decide on your tactics before you can move onto implementation – otherwise you risk creating confusion and frustration.

3. Keep the management on-side

So you’ve agreed with your key players what you are going to do – now you need to keep the management – or executive team  on-side. Often this simply means updating them on your plan and giving them an opportunity to contribute before you put it into action. This will ensure the exec can see how your plan will support the organisation’s goals.

If your exec knows you have consulted their influential managers, they will be much more confident of success. Their permission will also give confidence to those implementing the plan.

4.  Deliver, adapt and measure

Now you are ready to play the game.  As you do, remember to have huddles to learn from how it’s going and make any necessary changes.

Sustainability is likely to challenge your  organisation in new ways, so give yourself the opportunity to tackle this.  Pick the right match statistics to know if you are on track and use them to review your progress. 

This is also your chance to involve the broader team by giving them roles and the space to contribute.  You can engage employees even more by celebrating success when you finally ruffle the net!

Three years ago Marks & Spencer made a bold commitment to sustainability with the launch of Plan A. They thought it would cost them £200 million but it's already adding millions to their profits. We want to help other companies find how social and environmental responsibility can pay.

M&S launched Plan A in 2007, making 100 commitments to tackle key challenges on climate change, waste, sustainable raw materials, "fair partnership" and health over five years. They expected to invest £200 million to achieve these goals but Plan A broke even early and added £50 million to the bottom line in 2009/10, according to their latest "How We Do Business" report.

M&S isn't the only leading company to have found a business case for sustainability. General Electric has spent $5 billion on R&D in the first five years of ecomagination but the program to develop the clean technologies of the future has already generated revenues of $70 billion.

With such shining examples you might think companies would be falling over themselves to find new opportunities in social and environmental responsibility. But the reality is that many struggle. That's why we're launching a new toolkit to help companies find the business case for sustainability.

Our experience at Forum for the Future is that the complexity and uncertainty of sustainability creates major barriers to making a business case. First, the numbers are much "softer" than senior decision-makers are used to. Companies are often breaking new ground, which is difficult to model quantitatively, and are also anticipating future trends.

Second, companies get stuck in a vicious cycle: finance directors want to see a business case before giving permission to go ahead with a sustainability project, but often the information to build that business case can only be generated from the experience of going ahead.

Finally, many financial tools designed to deal with certainties are ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of how business succeeds in the face of sustainability challenges like climate change, peak oil and population growth.

So, we have developed a set of tools to help companies get over those barriers and make better decisions which generate real value. We've given it a cunning name – the Better Decisions, Real Value toolkit. It's designed to be used by sustainability practitioners and finance professionals in any organization to determine how sustainability can add value to their business.

The Foundations guide sets out the general business case for sustainability, equipping you with the arguments you need to start your case.

Entry points is a step-by-step guide to winning permission to go ahead with a sustainability-related initiative, so that you have the clarity of purpose you need, an understanding of the organizational context, a plan for a possible project, and a strategy to influence internal stakeholders.

The Pathways tool summarizes the different ways sustainability can create financial value, and gives guidance on how to collect evidence to make your business case.

The Ready Reckoner helps you assess which of these pathways to value are most important for your project and calculate good enough numbers to get the permission to start.

We developed the tools working with a number of Forum for the Future's closest corporate partners on their business case. I've discussed some of our thinking in previous posts about lessons on finding a business case, tips for getting buy-in from finance, and seven steps that could save you millions.

We're really keen for people to use the BDRV toolkit. We want to hear about your successes but we also want your feedback on how to improve the tools and what else you need. So, please download them here and then send your feedback to d.bent@forumforthefuture.org.

This blog post originally appeared here at GreenBiz.com on 13th August 2010

Communications technology can help organisations introduce greener, more productive working practices and save millions in the process.

When O2 moved to new headquarters earlier this year it put in place a greener working programme with impressive results: £3.84m saved in hot-desking alone; 100% of flexible workers report better work-life balance; absenteeism down; and a 53% reduction in head office CO2 emissions.

Forum has been helping O2 develop and implement its sustainability strategy for the last few years so they invited me to open this webinar on how to use communications technology to enable greener working. I was asked why the agenda should be important to organisations. The basic answer: you can save money while getting ready for a carbon-constrained future.

You can watch the webinar to find out more about the technology O2 used to achieve its results and, crucially, the way they involved people in creating the new social practices around how to use that technology well.

My opening is much more about the scale and urgency of the challenge of climate change. The Sustainable Development Commission's Prosperity without Growth illustrates the scale: we will need to get 130 times more economic value for every gram of CO2 emitted by 2050. The Met Office's report on Informing Choices gives the urgency: to have a 50% chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming we must have peak global emissions by 2020, with 5% reductions each year thereafter.

Greener working will never be the full answer. But it is a start that most organisations can make that does have financial returns now. An astute business person can use it to start exploring the opportunity for their business to profit from moving to a carbon-constrained world.

Shock them? Seduce them? Educate them? All of the above? When it comes to getting people to accept the reality of climate change (and the urgent need to be doing something about it), politicians have got themselves into a bit of a pickle by depending too much on the science.

Scientists would love to think that evidence alone would be sufficient to guarantee people’s buy-in. To their growing horror, however, people’s scepticism about climate change has deepened even as the evidence has hardened.

Bottom line: science alone is not enough. The truth has not set us free. And nor will it.

This is where the Creative Industries can play a vital role. When it comes to shocking, seducing and educating, there’s no limit to the creativity that can be brought to bear on influencing people’s attitudes and behaviour.

Delighting people with new designs for everyday appliances; inspiring them with spirit-lifting music; building empathy with brilliant documentaries; ‘selling’ sustainability through viral marketing; fashioning fair-trade clothing; creating a new ‘app’ to help people make better use of public transport – or even their legs: there’s a wealth of ways to mobilise the talents and resources of all the different sectors that make up the Creative Industries.

But these are not industries that see themselves at the cutting edge of today’s sustainability agenda. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that the majority of the very large number of SMEs involved have very little awareness of their own sustainability-related performance. Let alone what they should be doing about it.

So Forum for the Future and the Creative Industries knowledge transfer network are setting out to address this. Today we’re launching a nationwide campaign designed to make the sector champions of a sustainable future.

We’ll be working with the industries to examine how the UK’s creative businesses can  use their skills to tackle issues like energy, climate change and social justice and help other sectors innovate. We want to inspire them with new business opportunities and also help them understand the rewards they can reap by improving their own sustainability performance.

Lord Puttnam, the distinguished film producer, will give a keynote speech at our launch event in London where some of the sector’s leading lights will take part in a round-table debate on how the Creative Industries can lead us to a sustainable future. We’ll follow it up with regional workshops where professionals from different parts of the sector can collaborate on how to turn these ideas into reality.

The Creative Industries are a vital part of the UK’s economy, generating almost £68 billion in 2007, and have huge power to change our world for the better. But it’s going to be difficult to ask them to play their part in shocking, seducing and educating the general public unless they first get their heads around the basics.

The round-table debate takes place on Wednesday June 16th and will be streamed live from 4pm at www.creativeindustriesktn.org/live/

Transcripts of the debate and a video of its highlights will be posted after the event on a website where industry professionals can follow the project and debate the issues it raises. http://creativeindustriesktn.org/beacons/pg/groups/689/sustainability/

For more information on the project click here.

I am a leftie, and more than that, I am an extreme leftie. So far left I am nearly off the spectrum. So what does that mean? Do I have pictures of Lenin hanging on my bedroom walls? NO! Do I want the state to control everything? NO! Do I carry a little red book with me at all times? NO! Because my declaration of leftism has nothing to do with my political persuasion, and it is in no way an indicator of how I voted at the general election, rather, my penchant for the left is indicative of the type of leader I am - at least that’s what I was told at the Leadership Trust last week.

As a Forum for the Future scholar I have been on a journey for the last nine months to discover, analyse, and decipher what type of leader I am and, more importantly, what type of leader I can become within the sustainable development movement. So what does it mean to be a leftie leader? Well, to give you a very brief overview, there are two types of leader at either end of the spectrum: those on the right who lead with their heads over their hearts, and those, like me, on the left, who lead with their hearts over their heads. Where one places oneself on the scale, by answering a series of revealing questions, reflects how likely one is to be a controlling, maybe even sadistic leader (far right) or to be a self-destructive and non-committal leader (far left). These, of course, are the extremes and most people find themselves hovering somewhere around the mid-point.

I was not surprised to find myself on the left. I know in my heart of hearts (proof in itself) that I am a leftie with a tendency to lead with my gut and to do what feels right.

When asked to rate me as a leader, however, nearly all of my fellow Scholars placed me on the right of the spectrum. I was perceived as someone who leads with their head rather than their heart. The conclusion of my peers can be interpreted in two ways: either, I am suitably convincing in making heart-felt decisions seem the logical and rational thing to do or, I flip-flop between the two styles of leadership, confusing those around me. To be honest, the latter is the far more likely explanation!

Understanding how you lead others, and how others perceive you to lead, is vital to becoming a good leader - irrelevant of your style. Taking part in the leadership exercise analysis at the Leadership Trust has also made me think about how I want to be led. A particularly relevant question given the recent general election. I must confess, however, that after diligently watching all three of the televised debates, I am still uncertain as to the type of leader Messrs Brown, Cameron and Clegg want to be.

I have studied the manifestos of each of the main parties as a part of the Masters course but I fear they could all turn out to be nothing more than Trojan horses with which to crash open the doors of No. 10. I have witnessed how vulnerable all leaders are in the monetary and media-saturated democracy in which we live. And I have watched as they have shown their true colours as followers, not leaders.

I now find myself asking what do I really want from the future leader of this country? As a wannabe leader in sustainable development, I have begun to realise that any leader whose aim is to create a more sustainable and fair future for the UK, and indeed the world, is going to have to use their heart and their head in equal measures. I hope that whoever ends up in Number 10 realises this too: good leadership, at every level, requires both heart and head.

The recent financial crisis demonstrated that large, unexpected disruptions happen. Most companies were not prepared, despite risk management procedures. Last year I was speaking to a senior accountant at a major company about the financial crisis. He said something truly startling: his company had struggled to roll over its debt in the corporate bond markets, and they had nearly gone under as a result. Fortunately they had found the funding in time, but it did prompt this question from the Finance Director: “why wasn’t that on my risk register?”.

Risk management failed in the financial crisis…
It is obvious that risk management failed in many financial institutions. Sometimes people failed to spot risks in their business model (for instance Northern Rock). Sometimes people failed to see the systemic risk of lots of companies having the same business model (both financial regulators and the big US investment banks). Sometimes people would spot the risks, but a combination of culture and strong personalities ignores the risks (Lehman Brothers). And, as my conversation above shows, there was a failure of risk management in many companies too.

People had assumed that tomorrow will look a lot like today only more so. Back in early 2008 we were so used to years of high-growth and low inflation that we thought it would continue forever. Now we now know we were creating asset bubbles and toxic debts that were just not sustainable. We were living beyond our means, and it was bound to come to a messy end. Companies and governments were either blind to the risks or were prepared to turn a blind eye for the sake of short-term success.

..and is failing again in the sustainability crisis
Well, exactly the same dynamic is being played out right now on a host of sustainability issues. Global society is acting as if tomorrow will be like today.

We are so used to a stable climate that we think it can go on forever – even though the science is categorically saying disruptive change will happen with business-as-usual. Bodies like the Met Office and the Tyndall Centre say that we need global carbon emissions to peak in the next ten years – or maybe less – if we are to have a path to a safe concentration of greenhouse gases. We are used to poverty in developing nations, and in our own countries too. We are so used to food security that we act as if it is inevitable.

The UN convened several hundred scientists to assess the natural world in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Their conclusion:

“Human activity is putting such a  strain on the natural functions of the Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems can no longer be taken for granted.”

So, we have been living beyond our means in another way. This is the decade when it will come to a messy end. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s recent ‘Vision 2050’ report calls the coming decade the “turbulent teens” with good reason.

In my view, corporate risk management is failing again. Few companies have a good handle on either the particular sustainability risks of their business model, or on the wider systemic risks these issues present. I believe no company is ready for the disruptions – and opportunities – that sustainability will bring over the next decade. But some are beginning.

Putting sustainability into strategy and risk management
Take PepsiCo, the global food and beverage giant. In 2008 they wanted to identify the business risks and opportunities of sustainability, and what it needs to do now to ensure it is successful in decades to come. With help from Forum for the Future, they developed several plausible versions of 2030 with inputs from literally hundreds of executives across the world. Senior executives used these global scenarios to identify and prioritise risks and opportunities, which were used in different ways

The corporate strategy team put the top five risks into their annual planning cycle. Each strategic business units was required to evaluate how exposed it is to each risk, and to create a plan to mitigate it.

Outside the annual planning cycle, PepsiCo is building ‘centres of excellence’ that create deep capability and learning on particular risks. For instance, there is a new team that focuses on sustainable agriculture, so it can mitigate the risks that climate and water crises pose to its supply chains. PepsiCo has applied the identified opportunities to its long-term research and development plans, as well as to other internal ‘innovation’ methods.

In addition, the whole process of creating and using scenarios means there are hundreds of PepsiCo executives who have a greater appreciation of how tomorrow will not be like today. The scenarios have been used in executive development programmes in Latin America.

The case for business leadership
The ‘turbulent teens’ will affect all businesses. Services we currently get from the natural world that are cheap today – like soil quality or flood prevention – will be expensive. The rules of the game will change: customers will expect businesses to be part of the solution; regulators and governments will incentivise and punish; and, investors will want to know how their assets are protected.

Companies need to change their risk management and more. In an interconnected world, it is sometimes hard to see who should act first. Waiting for governments to regulate or for changes in customer demand risks acting too late and greater costs. The longer we wait, the greater damage will be and the more we will have to do once we start. This, then, is the case for business leadership.

There is another angle, looking at how much businesses like to operate without government interventions. The financial crisis compelled governments to break with economic orthodoxy and seriously intervene in markets. How much will governments have to do if we delay action on climate change by another 5 years? If you believe in free-markets then you should be lobbying for market solutions now, rather than risk big government interventions later.

If companies are in the business of long-term value creation, then they need to do more than satisfy shareholders’ desires for returns in the short-term. They also need to create the foundations for future successes. It means acting now for the best future, and preparing for radical change.

What you can do today
Here’s what that can mean in practice:

1. Act now to achieve the best future

• Look for commercial opportunities that generate immediate returns and are the first steps to a sustainable future. Examples: GE’s Ecomagination and M&S’s Plan A.
• Create alliances to identify and manage risks, with investors, customers, staff, competitors and regulators. Example: The Forest Stewardship Council came from an alliance of NGOs and companies wanting to protect forests.

2. Prepare for radical change

• Explore different plausible futures to identify a wider range of risks and opportunities. Example: see PepsiCo above.
• Take a broad definition of the challenges, and avoid reducing sustainability simply to climate change. Example: see PepsiCo.
• Embedding sustainability in key decision-making and operational delivery. Example: Balfour Beatty are using their understanding of sustainability in key decisions like business development and training people on what sustainability means in their operational roles.

For more see: Acting Now for Positive 2018, Preparing for Radical Change, sponsored by Capgemini.

For more on the PepsiCo example see the Global Scenarios and Strategy 2030 project.

This article was first published in Sustainable Business. Click here for the magazine’s digital edition.

Sustainability is no longer the preserve of niche brands. Major manufacturers and retailers are now recognising the value that integrating sustainability into their key product lines can deliver, both in terms of strengthening ties with the consumer and for protecting their market share in an increasingly uncertain future.

At our recent Mainstreaming sustainability into brands event, Ben Eavis from Sainsbury’s explained the principles behind making their bananas exclusively Fairtrade and Alex Cole from Cadbury spoke passionately about the motivation and the journey that the chocolate manufacturer embarked on in their Purple Goes Green transformation.

We captured the essence of the event in a short video:

You can also watch or download it here: http://vimeo.com/10174247

Video round-up:

Dr Sally Uren, Deputy Chief Executive of Forum for the Future, introduced the session by talking about the opportunity for brands to accelerate the transition to a more sustainable world (0:00-03:08 mins)

Ben Eavis, Corporate Responsibility and Ethical Trading Manager, Sainsbury's gave examples of how they are making the more sustainable decision on behalf of the consumer (e.g. by making all their bananas Fairtrade), and talked through some of what is going on 'behind the scenes' to get sustainability at the heart of the Sainsbury's brand (03:09-09:09 mins)

Alex Cole, Global Corporate Affairs Director, Cadbury, set out how they segment consumers and what that means for Cadbury. She then described the story of how Cadbury Dairy Milk has embedded sustainability into the brand. (09:10-18:23 mins)