Need to get people thinking differently, to create momentum and a shared sense of direction in your sustainability program? You might be interested to find out more about New Angles Springboards to Sustainability. In line with our focus on mindset and behaviour change for sustainability we have created a series of these tools designed on the principles of dialogue and action.

For example, our new mini-simulation on Creating Stakeholder Value: in less than two hours you can get productive dialogue happening around the subject of creating value for stakeholders in order to create more value for your own organisation. Working equally effectively in small and large groups, teams are tasked to come up with a portfolio of projects to take a fictional business forward over the next 3 years of its 10-year sustainability journey. The challenge is to create positive financial and non-financial returns for the company through the unorthodox strategy of starting from the needs of stakeholders. The Springboards to Sustainability software then feeds back both financial and non-financial value created by each team's choice of projects. Teams can see how their strategic thinking compared with others', understand how some teams created more value than others, reflect on how they could make similar decisions in their own real-life stakeholder system - and recognise why we often don't think that way in practice. What counts is not so much the score your team achieved, but the shared discussions that led to your recommendations. The real learning happens around the table and during the facilitated debates that follow. This is just one example of how New Angles Springboards work. We have others we'd love to tell you about - and we can tailor one specifically to your own sustainability transformation issues. Drop us a line!

 

You may or may not have heard of Ray Anderson. If not, we strongly recommend that you get to know his books, his business achievements, his powerful legacy. At the age of 60, as CEO of a successful modular flooring manufacturer in the US, he read Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce and suddenly saw himself and his company in a totally new light, as plunderers who had been stealing the world's natural resources - their synthetic carpet tiles were 100% dependent on petro-chemicals - and getting away with it scot-free.

Where another man might have thought of giving up the activity which now seemed so misguided and selling his company, Ray Anderson decided to stay where he was and reinvent Interface (now InterfaceFlor) instead. He worked on his fellow executives and colleagues until they were ready to embark on a transformation programme that they termed climbing Mount Sustainability. Despite rocky moments, particularly during an economic downturn that hit a few years into the programme, Ray Anderson persisted and eventually came to believe that without the commitment to industrial sustainability his company would not have survived. It did better than that in the end and grew top and bottom lines at a formidable rate, proving to a sceptical world that sustainability and profitability can go hand in hand.

Many many people have told the Interface story and have paid tribute to Ray Anderson's contribution, particularly in the few weeks since his death in early August. We never met the man directly, but like many others we owe him a considerable debt. When we first took the plunge and committed to helping business organisations build their sustainable future, it was first and foremost Ray Anderson's achievements at InterfaceFlor that inspired us and educated us. What inspired us most was his determination to change his company from the inside, with the same employees, the same suppliers, the same clients, when many others would have balked at the sheer scale of the mountain to be climbed. That showed guts and real commitment to his new values. Thank you for that, Ray, thank you very much.

If you would like to watch a video tribute to this extraordinary industrial pioneer and transformational leader, you can find one here.

Image: Celcias