The accumulating scientific evidence regarding climate change, ecosystems loss, water shortages, and other changes is disheartening. And business leadership knows it. In a recent survey of 1,000 CEOs of large companies in 27 industries across 103 countries, only 32% believed that the global economy was on track to meet the sustainability needs created by a growing population and rising environmental and resource constraints. Far from scaling back on resource use, we’re consuming more resources than ever – even as sustainability mainstreams. Why? Some explanations are simple: Gains in efficiencies are almost always offset by increased consumption. The system changes required to make value chains sustainable require unprecedented levels of trust and cooperation among economic actors. Our current tools, methods, and models for sustainable business are not being adopted at the scale and speed needed to shift the numbers noticeably. We helped create these tools and we have observed the challenges first hand. We have come to realize that these explanations don’t tell the whole story. A fundamental and often overlooked cause is a leadership mindset that takes only a partial view of the multifaceted relationship between business and nature. This partial view sees business’s relationship to nature as separate, instrumental, and reducible to market transactions alone. This isolated mindset blinds leadership to the necessary innovations required to profitably address the great systemic challenges before us. With an isolated mindset, leaders focus mainly on the portion of the business-nature relationship that can be quantitatively analyzed. Less tangible social and ecological factors are considered as context – something that is nice but not essential to the decision-making calculus because it is not measurable. blogs.hbr.org/2013/11/sustainable-business-initiatives-will-fail-unless-leaders-change-their-mindset/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=pulsenews#!
Posted on: Wed, 13 Nov 2013 22:06:26 +0000
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