How Sustainability Impacts Business Strategy

Dr Aoife Brophy, Guest Expert on the Oxford Executive Strategy Programme from Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, explains that, as sustainability becomes a key focus for many businesses, so too grows the need for new strategic approaches in order to achieve sustainable development goals.

Transcript

So, these different dimensions of sustainable development challenges, they really imply three main approaches, I think, to thinking about sustainable development for strategy and for thinking about strategy in a way that can open up new opportunities.

So, just starting with the first: thinking in systems. The concept of sustainable development itself; it only really makes sense at the level of systems. And what all of this means for strategy is that organisations need to move away from thinking in a linear way.

There needs to be much more focus on understanding connections, on understanding interdependencies throughout existing value chains, and throughout future value chains when bigger system transitions have actually been successful.

The second approach is focusing on needs, and it can be very difficult for organisations, in particular, to understand what sustainable development means in practice. That can be a very difficult problem for many different organisations to engage in, in developing appropriate strategies.

Some of this challenge comes from the fact that many of the sustainable development challenges we’ve already mentioned are very interconnected with each other. So, it’s not possible to really focus on climate without thinking about the impacts on health and on food systems, for example. One way of being able to see the connections between different systems is to step back from those individual systems, to step back from individual problems or solutions, and to focus instead on underlying needs.

The third approach is to engage with tensions. And I think this is absolutely critical for anyone involved in strategy. There are always tensions within the sustainable development goals, where, for example, there is a focus on achieving economic growth, but at the same time, pushing for transformation of entire systems of production and consumption. And some of those system transformations actually require us to step back and to think about: is growth the right thing for us to be targeting? Should that be different in different industries? What’s our responsibility as individual organisations, as entire industries, to society? So, this questioning, along with ensuring that there are enough resources to provide people with jobs, for example, to make sure that we’re reducing poverty. For individual organisations within this complex, contextual environment, it’s really important for anyone involved in strategy to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

For organisations, this engaging with tensions is obviously very, very difficult to do, but it requires having diversity internally in your own organisation. It requires regular processes for being able to engage with different external actors, for example.

And by being able to bring these three different approaches to strategy together – thinking in systems, focusing on needs, and engaging with tensions – we have a much better chance of being able to achieve the sustainable development goals.