Learn & Adapt
Description
These resources will help you to identify and learn from concerns, near misses, and failures related to sustainability and to develop and share proactive and adaptive systems for future success.
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Resources
Companies Are Scaling Back Sustainability Pledges. Here’s What They Should Do Instead.
Between 2023 and 2024, many companies retreated from their sustainability commitments. This HBR article can help you understand why this lapse in commitment is shortsighted and how to get back on track. The author, Kenneth Pucker, explains the common financial and political factors responsible for this rollback and outlines how companies can move forward. This involves replacing unrealistic targets with meaningful actions; rethinking supplier relationships to account for impacts that primarily occur outside of a company's direct control; applying internal carbon pricing to better reflect true costs of activities and investments; and reshaping governance structures to ensure accountability and expertise in sustainability initiatives. This resource will benefit both business leaders and sustainability practitioners.
Why Corporate Sustainability Goals Fail (And What Leaders Can Do About It)
This short article from Triple Pundit can help you understand common factors holding back businesses from taking strategic action on sustainability. Based on a report that surveyed over 200 professionals, it highlights three key factors: accessible sustainability performance data is needed to support and enable sustainability-aligned decision-making and meet new reporting requirements; more cross-functional collaboration is needed to fully integrate sustainability into strategic planning; and getting sustainability work properly resourced requires developing the conversation around how it creates value as a strategic rather than a moral imperative.
Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (Intelligently): How Great Organizations Put Failure to Work to Innovate and Improve
Every organisation experiences failure, but too few leverage the experience and related learning for future success. This comprehensive paper identifies systemic social and technical barriers that prevent intelligent use of failure, and identifies three processes for overcoming them: identifying failure, analyzing failure, and deliberate experimentation. The paper also provides six tangible actions to help you leverage insights from failure to promote innovation and improvement.
Changing the Way We Change the World
This short film will help you to recognise the inconsistencies that may arise between your organisation's external social purpose and the way that purpose is experienced by people inside your organisation on a day-to-day basis. It was developed by Organization Unbound, a global community exploring the relationships, structures, and intentions of social change.
3 companies tell us their failures on sustainability
This short article from Trellis can help you understand the importance of sharing sustainability missteps in order to help your organisation and others learn from them. It highlights three examples from Chief Sustainability Officers at Loreal, Levi's, and Human Scale. L’Oréal’s CSO shares their challenges with circular packaging; Levi’s CSO shares how efforts to integrate recycled material into their product resulted in a blended material that could not be further recycled; and Human Scale's CSO explains how a takeback program for office furniture was circular in theory but ineffective in practice. These examples will be useful to all sustainability practitioners.
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