We often get the question from people: how they can make their organisation more sustainable? What actions they can take? Where can they start making impact?

Therefore we would like to share our lessons from a corporate environment, and hope it will give people working in both larger and smaller companies some starting points on what to do and how to do it.

Large impact on reducing CO2 emissions can be made by transforming existing companies into sustainable businesses. While there are many ideas in most companies, it is not just about ideas, but also how to translate them into concrete plans, get others along with your plans and implement the changes. We’d like to share some of the lessons we learned. Basically, there are just five steps that we consider to be essential for realizing impactful changes within an organisation.

Step 1: Define the challenge

Defining a good challenge is the starting point of making a change. The challenge often becomes clear through discussions with various people inside and outside your organisation, and should contribute to a positive change for sustainability. It should be ambitious, realistic, and engage people to contribute. It’s important to back it up with numbers and literature to show the opportunity in terms of size and impact.

Examples can be:

• reduce energy use or replace by green energy
• explore new sustainable production technologies
• work with clients and suppliers to make the value chain circular

A good place to start the discussion: Which products, parts or processes emit most CO2? Can you eliminate, replace or reduce these?

Step 2: Identify your stakeholders top-down or bottom-up

Becoming green is not just about technical changes. The switch also requires organisational change and personal leadership. You need to list your main colleagues, clients and suppliers (i.e. stakeholders) to realise your plan.

Who are the decision makers, who is supporting and who is critical in the execution? Analyse their needs and explain how your plan can benefit them.

Step 3: Create the business case

Your senior management probably makes decisions based on numbers, a bit on gut feeling. So your next step is to create a sustainable business case. Our definition of sustainable business is: a long-term profitable business with positive effects on people and planet, and its activities are within the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ as laid down by the planetary boundary model (ref. stockhold resilience center). This means it should be a sustainable business for both your organisation and outside.

A great tool to start shaping your business case is the Business Model Canvas (many good reference guides are available online). Think in detail about who the paying client is, what their need is and why would they pay for it. Potentially you can pivot the current business model of your organisation to realise more impact.

Step 4: Set-up a strategic action plan

Now it’s time to convert the idea into practical actions and think about a strategy of how to implement changes. For that you need to identify the levers for change; e.g certain people, or types of organisation structures.

We recommend doing a force field analysis, to understand positive drivers and competitive forces (i.e. time, interest, resources) inside and outside the organisation.

Try to understand what type of organisation you are working in and how change happens. This can be in organisational aspects such as structure and processes, resources, skills, time and investment but also in the wider context such as interests of stakeholders. Based on that you can list the key actions, who needs to do it, target dates and expected costs.

The end results is a clearly argumented plan for your senior management to give you a budget and approve execution. In our experience, to get that approval (but also to have a buy-in from other stakeholders), it normally works much better to ask ‘how do you think we can make the plan work together? , instead of simply asking for formal approval. This way, they are more likely to start supporting you, collaborate and give valuable input to make the plan even better.

Step 5: Use your passion and energy

Once you have all your stakeholders on board and the plan approved, the last step is start making it work! It will not always be easy, but you will learn a lot and make a positive impact on the planet!

Passion leads to Attention. And Attention leads to Action. And Action is what we need!

Need help driving sustainability in your company? Let us know. TransitionHERO is here to have impact and help others to do so. We’d be glad to support you.