Technological innovation alone will not achieve the required reductions in carbon emissions and biodiversity depletion. No matter how many efficiency measures we roll out, technical efficiency won’t be enough unless without a fundamental shift in business models and traditional thinking about business performance.
The pitfall for organisations when crafting their sustainability strategy is to assume their organizational system is simple and predictable when in reality it is complex and requires a much more agile and adaptive strategic approach.
In times of crisis we must make decisions based on what is right and not on what is most comfortable or routine. When we are really scared – what have we got to hang on to? The only thing we can hang on to is – what is the right thing to do? Because nothing else can be trusted as real.
But people follow purpose – with much more intensity than they follow job titles or money. The challenge is to allow yourself and your organisation to be purpose-led, principles focused and where performance is measured as purpose translated.
It is comparatively easy to help organisations to learn when they are facing a crisis. What is less easy is to enable them to learn continually. This requires moving learning from being perceived as a mandatory requirement to being embraced as a requirement for individual and collective growth, a requirement for life.
Never have we been so forewarned about a crisis that is unfolding and worsening in front of us. And too many organisations and sectors remain hell-bent on adopting the targets that they can get away with rather than the targets that are needed.