Sustainability can be a confounding topic and not everyone has the passion to wade into all the literature to learn about it. Yet virtually everyone is willing to take steps towards sustainability if someone would just explain, in clear and understandable language, what can be done.
The explosive growth in the US green building industry, for example, was fuelled largely by the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) system of checklists that made it easy for architects, developers and facilities managers to make more sustainable choices.
Fortunately, once people understand sustainability, they are often surprised to find how many untapped sustainable practices make good bottom-line business sense now.
It is hard to manage an organization in today’s turbulent world. Practically every day, we learn of a new technology, social dilemma or environmental problem. Businesses worry about the proliferation of new regulations and the effects of globalization. Governments struggle to maintain services while addressing the needs of an increasingly diverse and growing population amid an anti-tax culture. Unless you want to be buffeted by each change, you need a framework for making sense of what is happening in the world so that you can foresee changes and take action before they happen.
Sustainability is such a framework. It doesn’t encompass everything you’ll need to track to be successful and it’s not a crystal ball. However, sustainability does help you see relationships between issues and more accurately forecast what may occur in the future. It examines our world as a whole system, revealing threats and opportunities. It forces you to see relationships between social, economic and environmental trends. This improved foresight can prevent unfortunate surprises and uncover previously unrecognized opportunities. If you understand sustainability, you can be a step ahead of the companies or communities with which you compete.
Sustainability challenges us to make decisions that simultaneously improve the economy, the community and the environment. That challenge may seem far outside the scope of your responsibility. Why would business take time to examine its impacts on these large and ‘squishy’ issues?
Think of sustainability as a wide-angle lens. It helps you to see beyond your normal field of vision to take in potential threats and opportunities that you might have missed before. In a global and connected world, what happens elsewhere can affect you.
