Today we're going to ask ourselves the question, how are we supposed to think about managing the transition to a sustainable enterprise. It is, as you’ve seen by now, the core overarching challenge that not only managers have, but really it is a challenge for academics as well to understand and study how these complex transformational processes in any organization can happen. It is a challenge for policymakers to understand how they can facilitate this transition. Essentially we're going to look today at a number of approaches that we have been developing on the basis of research, collaborative research that we've been conducting over the years within a very large community of scholars, managers, firms, institutions. This community is called GOLDEN for Sustainability. It’s an acronym, stands for Global Organizational Learning and Development Network. It is made up of about 160 academics in 60 different universities around the world, literally from the best known universities to the best universities in all the key developing countries, across all the five continents essentially. But more importantly we've been working in collaboration with companies that have been interested, have been really making serious efforts to transition toward sustainable enterprise models, and also with institutions like the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, with different projects that have been also obviously interested in supporting this transition, this process that obviously has a global planetary importance, particularly after the launch of the UN sustainable development goals. So what are the key results that this community of scholars, companies, institutions has developed over the last seven or eight years of working together? First of all, it is clear that most companies who are seriously committed to develop a sustainable way to manage their business are struggling fundamentally with the integration of their many initiatives that they are creating with really the business plan, with the real strategic initiatives and business activities that they're also obviously fundamentally focused on. This integration is very difficult because it is perceived as extremely risky, complex, uncertain, and that is the one aspect that requires really an innovation and experimentation effort, to lower the risks, to increase the comfort that companies can have in this transition process. The other problem that is equally important is the fact that this transition requires really a shift in the mindset of managers, particularly senior executives, but also, you know, going down the entire organization. So it is the combination of the integration of sustainability plans with the business plan and the transition of the mindset, of the way that managers really think about their own role and the role of the organization that really makes the transition so complex. That is the reason why we have started to explore on innovative ways to combine these two, well, these two challenges in a seamless, fluid process of tackling both the mindsets problem as well as the experimentation and innovation problem. So, we would like you to consider a learning journey, essentially, that is what this is all about. Learning how to tackle these two challenges starts from a dual step, in a way. On one hand it's a question of engaging the senior management of the organization in collecting, actually, data, assessing the status quo of the organization across all the various dimensions of sustainability. Each manager responsible for a given function or a given product line would be involved ideally in the engagement of the relevant stakeholders and collecting the evidence of the impact, the social and environmental impacts of their activities. At the same time, in this initial phase, our suggestion is to also introduce learning processes that start working on that mindset shift, right, through introspective, and even meditative techniques, which we have seen evidence for having a very deep influence in not only lengthening the time horizon of managers, but also in broadening the concept of value, right, really the idea of creating common value can be nurtured, can be developed through this specific type of learning experiences. On the basis of the data collected in the self-assessment exercise and on the basis of the evolving sustainability-oriented mindset, a process of, if you want, you can call it strategizing, road mapping, but a process of, essentially, dialogue, internal dialogue as well as dialogue together with stakeholders, relevant stakeholders, to clarify, to distill the image of the sustainable version of their company, what, you know, we would like to be, what kind of sustainable company we would like to be. The answer to that question is the result of a collective exercise on the basis of the empirical data, on the basis of the evidence from the self assessment exercise that has been made before. That would allow then the process, would launch the process of road mapping, i.e. prioritizing the various change objectives, change processes that the company thinks are important, obviously vis-a-vis their status quo. Whatever dimension the company considers particularly important for their strategic goals would be prioritized, say, incentive systems should be changed first and then we would change the accounting or control systems and then the supply chain, or simultaneously different types of organizational change. So that is, if you want, the second step of a collective, inclusive road mapping exercise. The final step in this process is one related to experimentation, if you want, of the real organizational change. Quite frankly, we have seen that many companies who are seriously committed to this transition toward sustainability are having a very hard time justifying, you know, significant changes, for example, in their control system or incentive systems, operations, strategic decision-making processes, or the governance. Those are big steps for any company to make. So our suggestion is actually to reduce those steps to small pilot projects designed for particular organizational units, for instance, or a subsidiary. And the design could be made so that the effects, the impacts can be measured against other units, similar units, that have not introduced those changes. This will provide the experience, first of all, what it feels like to manage an organization in a sustainable way, at least in that particular dimension. The experience is critical. Sustainability is an experienced good, in a way. It can only be understood if you really try it. And the second advantage of this is that the data that can be collected on the changes, on the impacts, for example, in terms of type of decision made and the performance, not only economic but also the social, environmental impacts, the stakeholder satisfaction levels, all of those concrete, quantifiable evidences can be then used to build a fact-based case for the top management to then consider the scaling up of the pilots. And particularly important, if different types of approaches to the change have been tried, one can also select the approach that has yielded the best results, and at that point then the scaling up to the rest of the organization would be a lot more justifiable, first of all, better understood, and then obviously deployed with more support from the top management and from the stakeholders.
