John Elkington is a world authority on corporate responsibility and sustainable development. Below he discusses his new report on the growing calls for a shift from incremental solutions to system change.
There are growing calls for a shift from incremental solutions to system change. So as our team worked on our latest report, titled Breakthrough: Business Leaders, Market Revolutions, we evolved a simple map that tracks the evolution of our agenda to date—and sketches some of the ways in which the Global C-Suite (our term for the top 1,100 companies that collectively control around 50% of global market capitalization) has already been impacted. We reproduce it below—and now offer a short, guided tour.
The Breakthrough Map
The vertical axis shows some key forces and drivers that have fuelled the agenda and propelled a growing number of companies and sectors to tackle environmental, social and governance challenges. Wind the clock back far enough in relation to any issue and you find that the original pressure for change came from activists, NGOs and other organs of civil society.
Over time, however, the torch tends to be picked up by governments and then by different parts of the worlds of business and finance. Leading companies have worked out how to partner with each of the new influences on the vertical axis. Today, for example, we see growing mainstream business interest in the potential lessons to be learned from the growing range of social and environmental enterprises.
In parallel, we also now see growing business involvement in pre-competitive initiatives designed to bring the resources of many different companies to bear, from the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals coalition in the sportswear sector through to The B Team, led by Sir Richard Branson and former PUMA CEO Jochen Zeitz.
Focusing back on the diagram, a diagonal trajectory runs from bottom left to top right, taking us from an early state of denial (where business lobbyists either dispute the existence of a problem or, where they accept there is a problem, energetically deny any link to the activities of a particular industry) through to the point of ‘breakthrough’—where the system jumps to a different, more sustainable, state.
Over time, a growing number of corporate pioneers shift the needle, moving beyond compliance to new forms of citizenship and corporate social responsibility. The next step beyond that, in the CSR space, is the evolution of new forms of social innovation, social entrepreneurship and new forms of impact investment.
Ultimately, however, many such approaches are found wanting—in that they fail to measure up to the nature and scale of the relevant challenges. That wake-up call is one we plan to sound in our next round of Breakthrough Forums, with major events planned both in Toronto and Berlin.
The diagram’s horizontal axis plots the growing number of C-Suite roles that have become embroiled in all of this as the agenda becomes more complex, more urgent and, for a growing number of sectors, increasingly strategic. The CSR and social innovation phases have seen the appointment of a growing number of Chief Sustainability Officers (CSOs). But for true system change CSOs can only hope to play a catalytic role. Ultimately every C-Suite role has to be involved, including the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), with the CSO’s early agenda properly embedded in all key functions.
One question we have often been asked since our Breakthrough Capitalism Forum last year, is what criteria should be used to define a breakthrough innovation, technology, business model or policy? Based on our research to date, we believe that any such initiative needs to be:
Future-ready: Able to work well in a world of 7-going-on-9 billion people, providing affordable access to key products or services, while respecting planetary boundaries
Ambitious: Aims to transform key aspects of capitalism, and drive radically better outcomes across the triple bottom line
Fair: Helps tackle equity issues, including the transfer of intergenerational debt created by public borrowing, natural resource extraction and environmental destabilization
Disruptive: Has potential to constructively disrupt the current economic and/or governance orders, moving the needle from incrementalism to system change.
Our short Breakthrough report provides a fair number of examples, but we are always looking for new cases – ideally ones that are still evolving. Please send any suggestions for future cases to breakthrough@volans.com.
.png)
COMMENTS