Sustainability Leadership through Simplification
Why do we hate change?
Progress, innovation and change are all words that we perceive as positive — and they are, but positive is not to be confused with simple, easy, clear and quick. You don‘t have to be a professional change manager to know that change does not start with agreements, harmony and optimism. Change happens because something is NOT going well, or not well enough, because we are finding a better way to travel, produce a product, communicate, run a country, treat each other or …. save the planet.
Change always starts with moments of frustration, confusion and disagreement (e.g. „Is Climate Change real?“) moving on to concern (e.g. „Climate change is killing our profits“) morphing into urgency (e.g. „Climate change is killing us“).
When we are finally at the point where we agree that there is a problem (e.g. everyone but Donald Trump in 2015 at the Paris Climate Agreement), we often cannot agree on how to fix it (yet). The bigger the problem, the more overwhelmed we get by the sheer complexity of the problem, let alone the solutions to solve the problem with and the order in which to tackle the different parts of the solution.
Change Leaders
This is where leadership comes in and there are various different ways a crisis can be dealt with. For example, the reaction to the financial crisis of 2007 was an influx of regulations (governments and regulators took the lead). But regulators are not always the ones that step up to the leadership plate.
In the current climate crisis we are seeing a mixture of leadership angles from all different stakeholders, which is desirable on the one hand but creates a bit of confusion on the other hand.
To simplify a little bit, let’s take the sustainability reporting/disclosure as an example. There are more than just a handful of driving forces at work that are tackling the ESG / Climate Change disclosure topic. Here a selection of stakeholders that are in one way or another trying to control this space:
- There are standard setters for reporting (IIRC, SASB, GRI, CDSB, CDP, FASB etc.),
- There are standard setters for data management (GHG Protocol, TPI, Natural Capital Coalition, World Benchmarking Alliannce etc.)
- There are NGOs and business groups (e.g. WBCSD) representing business interests
- There are supranational organizations (UN, Global Compact, OECD, UNEP FI) attempting to align global endeavors and
- There are regulators that are setting rules and taxonomies for disclosures, labeling, emission restrictions etc. (e.g. Europe, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, Japan, China).
Simplification as a change accelerator
All of the before mentioned frameworks, guidelines and standards have been developed by brilliant minds, experienced experts, with good intentions. It is now time that the rest of us understand them, challenge them and bring them together so that we can all speak the same „reporting language“ (like the alliance between SASB and GRI and the Corporate Reporting Dialogue CDR).
A large part of leadership is providing direction by giving transparency — it means breaking „it“ down into simple messages, easy to understand concepts and if possible, step by step guidance. Part of this process, and the responsibility of the leader, is to critically assess and challenge the current system.
Not everything that has a „sustainability“ stamp on it is „good“. This is true for products we buy int he supermarket (like those organic cucumber that come individually wrapped in a layer of plastic), and it is also true for ESG / Sustainability initiatives as mentioned above.
Throughout this blog writing process, it has crystallized that my personal goal for Sustainability leadership is to explain the status quo by breaking off bite size pieces of the big sustainability pie so that all the brilliant minds out here can focus on the real problem at hand — the climate crisis.
In my next piece, I am going to take a closer look at the EU taxonomy, which in my view, needs to be assessed a lot more critical than it has been so far.
