Business Redesign
One of the biggest questions for all of us right now is how to make business sustainable. Unless we are to return to living in relatively isolated hunter gather communities, then we will need to collaborate to clothe, house, feed and entertain ourselves. That will be, in the broadest of terms, doing the business. So how will we do it? Who will own, co-ordinate, direct and manage truly sustainable businesses? What will a sustainable business model look like – would we recognise it?
Paul Hawken, the American entrepreneurial ecological activist, considered these questions and decided that it is:
Hawken, P. (1993). The Ecology of Commerce. London: HarperCollins. pp. XIII-IV
I agree with Paul. We need to drink deep in the Intrinsic Spring, be as silly as we can and come up with a really intelligent, original solution (See “Being More” post). There are of course issues to deal with at the macro-level to enable the existing economy to transform towards sustainability. But equally important are changes at the micro-level where the transformation will require the support of a new generation of sustainable and restorative business models. After all, a business model provides the logic of value creation and if this logic changes, then the business model changes too.
In short, simply making things more sustainable is not enough. There are a growing number of organisations and companies that are trying to integrate sustainability into the heart of their operations. This requires a different logic for value creation, a redesign of processes both internally and in the chain, and changes to organisational and earning models. Together this leads to a new generation of business models that are based on a radically different configuration of assumptions than conventional business models. At the heart of this lies a different view of value creation. In conventional business models financial values take centre stage. In the new generation of models this shifts to a configuration of social and ecological as well as financial values – multi-value business models.
From the 1970 onwards, history reveals a succession of initiatives intended to broaden the aim and objectives of development for nations, for businesses and for individuals. In the business world, these initiatives took the form of the Stakeholder Society, Organisational Legitimacy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Management, Social and Environmental Accounting, Factor Four and Factor Ten Resource Efficiency, Industrial Ecology, the Circular Economy, Ecological Modernisation, Triple Bottom Line strategies, the Global Reporting Index, Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing, a plethora of business sustainability indices and more. However, these initiatives have by and large been accommodated by businesses without a change in core business financial values. That needs to change.
The Modern worldview was too simplistic. Its economics and business models were created in a world that we can think of as mechanistic with straightforward drives, cogs, spindles and wheels that turned in a discrete world of their own making. Nature entered this business worldview only as Resource to keep the wheels turning – nothing more. Nature was essentially a passive onlooker for businesses plundering.
However, reality has caught up with us. As our second post, “The Transformation of Business, Development and People Part One: Recognition”, explained, we now live in an intrinsically active complexity of relations coming from social and ecological as well as economic realms. We need a different approach to business management.
Birkin, F.K. and Polesie. (2012). Intrinsic Sustainable Development: Epistemes, Science, Business and Sustainability. Singapore: World Scientific. p. 291.
We can no longer drive companies like a bulldozer by building up power and pushing hard on the accelerator to force a direct way forward. Rather we are now at sea in a small dinghy. We now have a host of different controls to fine tune and make headway – or not, if the weather, winds and tides change.
Note that Boat Companies are not lost at sea but are carefully making way by being sensitive to changing conditions, by being flexible in their response and by not being too fixed on their destinations. We may or may not make port tonight!
Multi-Value Businesses
Businesses operate in complex environments. They always have done so but for centuries they have got away with being simplistically economic and short-term at heart. Now they need to see all the critical relations that constitute themselves and the world they operate within. To be able to see such relations, they need to shed any economic blinkers around their core values and be free to appreciate the multiple values that the complex relations of the world have to offer.
(Just trying wooing your life’s love with a price tag, discounting your mother’s worth or discarding those stuck-in-your-heart, making life worth-living, eyes opening, deep soul-searching, breath taking, never-to-be-forgotten, close encounters with nature as wildlife or as stunning scenery! We fill our lives with, enjoy enormously, find-meaning in, and restore ourselves with, those natural encounters – so why can’t businesses do something similar? After all, businesses are just people.)
By putting multi-values in the heart of businesses, in the business core, directors and managers will start seeing worlds far richer than money can buy. Furthermore, since the word is transforming, those in-tune businesses will be proactive and will enjoy first-mover advantages. That is to say, adopting core multi-values makes good business sense. To do otherwise, to stay constrained by financial core values, would be to implement sub-optimal, temporary solutions that will eventually be challenged and replaced by the emerging generation of businesses that have fully grasped the implications of the transformation and have revised their business models, core values, products and services accordingly.
Triple Top Line Businesses
Many twisting and contorting businesses have tried to hang onto financial core values whilst pretending to behave like multi-value businesses. These businesses have adopted a Triple Bottom Line approach that says that they will look after a business bottom line of society, environment and economics. But by doing so, they will have not solved Hawken’s design problem; each and every act is not “sustainable and restorative”. Rather this approach, just like Dad Dancing, simply doesn’t work too well.
So much more good would be achieved, if these businesses were to work instead with a Triple TOP Line:
“The triple bottom line has been, and remains, a useful tool for integrating sustainability into the business agenda. Balancing traditional economic goals with social and environmental concerns, it has created a new measure of corporate performance. A business strategy focused solely on the bottom line, however, can obscure opportunities to pursue innovation and create value in the design process. New tools for sustainable design can refocus product development from a process aimed at limiting end of pipe liabilities to one geared to creating safe, quality products right from the start.
This new design perspective creates triple top line growth: products that enhance the well being of nature and culture while generating economic value. Design for the triple top line follows the laws of nature to give industry the tools to develop systems that safely generate prosperity. In these new human systems, materials become food for the soil or flow back to industry forever. Value and quality are embodied in products, processes and facilities so intelligently designed, they leave footprints to delight in rather than lament. When the principles of ecologically intelligent design are widely applied, both nature and commerce can thrive and grow.”
McDonough, W. and Braungart, M. (2002). Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press.
William McDonough, left, and Michael Braungart, right.
Symbiotic Businesses: The Art of Living Together
Many thanks to William and Michael for the inspiration that they have given the world and me. But to emphasise our birth and on-going existence (hopefully!) in ecological relations, we would like to take the “Triple Top Line” meaning and practises and extend them and embed them more clearly in nature.
To acknowledge and strengthen our dependence and good impacts upon the living world, as well as providing a clear and memorable link with science, we will henceforth use the term “Symbiotic Business” to mean those businesses that generate restorative and sustainable social and ecological as well as economic benefits derived from their multiple core values. Such business will seek to perform in exemplary Triple Top Line style as well learning how to live well with our neighbours in the biosphere.
(N.B. The term “Symbiotic Business” is already in business use, notably among consultants who are promoting a network and relationship approach to business development. This kind of use of the term is narrow and reinforcing of business-as-usual without an ecological dimension. We have taken the term a step further into full, face-on reality.)
Symbiosis: The Art of Living Together
Clownfish are protected by anemones and they attract prey with their bright colours to thereby provide more food for their host.
Photo by courtesy of National Geographic.
The word Symbiosis was first used in science in the late 1800s. The word comes from the Greek symbiosis that refers to a state of living together: a combination of syn meaning “with” and bios meaning “life.”
More Symbiotic Business please
