The Sustainable Business Cycle

The Sustainable Business Cycle (SBC): Focuses on how your business addresses sustainability as you develop and adapt your business capabilities to meet changing conditions, especially disruptions. It uses a “sustainability lens” to uncover potential improvements across your extended enterprise. The SBC helps you analyze your business both as a whole and at key phases where you can focus on specific sustainability improvements. The SBC introduces a business sustainability perspective (or lens) that improves your understanding of how your business currently operates within its economic, socio-political, and environmental context.

  1. Commit to Sustainability: Our approach starts with a commitment to sustainability, which must be communicated and implemented throughout your organization to realize the significant improvements that your business can achieve.
  1. View from Sustainability Perspective: As the global business context is changing rapidly, force fitting new situations into old “business-as-usual” mental maps is a prescription for problems. It takes a concerted, long-term effort to learn how to look at the world with sustainability as a primary consideration.
  1. Sense & Interpret: This is the phase where you and your stakeholders look at the bigger picture and jointly agree on where you are, what sustainability improvements need to made (or have been made), and what you jointly believe to be your threats and opportunities.
  1. Strategize & Plan: Planning for a sustainable business differs from traditional strategic & initiative planning because it is (a) broader in scope to encompass a variety of trends & potentially disruptive events, and (b) uses an extended planning horizon, focusing first on impact rather than likelihood. Because change today is happening more quickly, to be able to act intelligently and rapidly organizations must pre-analyze strategic factors, monitor them closely, and act quickly when trigger conditions are recognized. This pre-analysis must include contingencies for all highly disruptive events that can be identified, even if they seem to be of low probability.
  1. Architect & Build: Ultimately, implementing your sustainable strategy will require you to transform your business capabilities (consisting of people, processes, systems and technologies, and other resources). The ability to adapt quickly to emerging threats & opportunities depends to a great extent upon the inherent flexibility built into these capabilities. The overall description of how your business is structured & operates, including the mechanisms it uses to achieve flexibility, resilience, and other sustainability goals, is your business’s Enterprise Architecture. A key component of Enterprise Architecture is your company's IT infrastructure, which can provide the "digital nervous system" needed for rapid response to events. So, while your strategy defines at a high level where the organization needs to go & why, the architecture must ensure that it uses those principles, models, and standards that enhance sustainability.
  1. Deploy & Operate: Improving sustainability clearly requires moving beyond strategy and architecture and actually implementing, deploying, and operating your business capabilities in accordance with your sustainability plans.
  1. Monitor & Adapt: You cannot possibly plan for everything or address unpredictable disruptions before they occur. However, you can mitigate potential damage if you react quickly and accurately. You can improve your reactive ability by pre-planning for significant potential disruptions. Considerations include:

    • Scenarios. As part of your strategic planning, have you identified a range of plausible futures and analyzed how each could disrupt your business?
    • Signal events. How will you recognize the various disruptions in their early stages? Who will do this? Do you need to create or strengthen a strategic trend/event tracking and analysis capability, including people, processes, and tools?
    Your response to signal events should be based upon established, adaptive governance, that is, governance policies based upon the recognition that reacting quickly and accurately to signal events is a primary determinant of business success and sustainability.
  1. Integrate across business: While it is possible to treat sustainability as a more-or-less independent consideration, doing so defeats the purpose. Only by integrating sustainable thinking and acting into the core, day-to-day business processes and systems—and ultimately into your company’s value proposition—will your company actually become significantly more sustainable and profit from the benefits.
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