The SBSA Approach to Business Sustainability

There are five main components to our approach to improving business sustainability. They work as follows:

  1. The Sustainable Adaptive Business Model helps you understand how your business can flex and adapt to disruptive shifts
  2. The Sustainable Business Cycle guides the evolution of your Business Idea and business capabilities to accommodate disruptive shifts
  3. Sustainable Business Methods of Strategy, Architecture, and Governance help you define disruption-resistant directions and initiatives, evolve business capabilities, and manage change
  4. The SEER Framework helps uncover resource-related risks and opportunities relevant to your business, both short and long term
  5. Sustainable Business Checklists help you get the important things right
The following provides a second level of information on each component. Click on any of them to see more details.



 The Sustainable Adaptive Business Model: Focuses on how your business addresses sustainability in day-to-day operations. This model includes both upstream and downstream sustainability issues in the value chain. It shows how and where to extend existing models to improve sustainability. Moreover, it helps you both to understand your overall business context as well as to drill down into the sustainability of specific business capabilities.


The Sustainable Business Cycle: Focuses on how your business addresses sustainability concerns as you develop and adapt your business capabilities to meet changing conditions, especially disruptions. It uses a "sustainability lens" to uncover potential risks and improvements across your extended enterprise. The cycle is iterative and adaptive, measures improvements, and pays particular attention to identifying trends and reacting rapidly to events that signal significant impact on your business.
Sustainable Business Methods: Ensure that you address sustainability concerns across all aspects of your business and at every stage of the Sustainable Business Cycle. The methods focus on integrating strategy, architecture, and governance as follows:
Strategy: Identify potential disruptions and adapt your core Business Idea to keep it robust for all important, plausible scenarios; adjust your portfolio of initiatives accordingly

Architecture: Design flexible business capabilities that can readily adapt to future disruptions, employing sustainable principles, models, standards, and implementation plans

Governance: Incorporate sustainability into decision making, progress monitoring, and watching for signal events that impact your strategy, enabling you to adapt rapidly

The SEER (Society, Economy, Environment, Resources) Framework: Organizes the information you need to analyze business opportunities, threats, and level of preparedness across your value chain, focusing on resources—the central challenge to sustainability—and how these relate to the social, economic, and environmental aspects of your business context.
Sustainable Business Checklists: Ensure that you effectively address the most important sustainability factors throughout your business. The checklists are actively updated to reflect changed circumstances and learning from experience.