80 percent of organizations don’t have the plan they need for sustainability

Not all companies are equal in sustainability: This may be obvious, but the number of firms lagging on both actions and mindset is stark…

• The hundreds of conversations with tech and service providers, and their clients, that fuelled our recently published Sustainability Services Ecosystem Mapping study about the state of organizational sustainability plans helped us categorize organizations into five buckets based on current status and approach: the reinventors, the roadmappers, the well-meaning middle, the waiters, and the greenwashers.
• We’re confident in saying 80% or more of organizations fall outside of the first two categories and still don’t have the sustainability plan they need, even accounting for differences in the definitions you could apply to organizations and the qualitative nature of this list.
• It’s critical not to pin the blame solely on organizations that lie behind on sustainability. Many supply chains aren’t yet seeing the pressure of sustainability translate into reporting and improvement requirements from regulators or customers. For example, an oil field services firm we spoke with recently in the US is seeing no ESG demands from its end customers—oil and gas supermajors—which, combined with a low margin competition, means that there’s no prospect of disclosure or investment soon unless forced by a national-level regulatory shift. In semiconductor manufacturing, we commented recently about the need for end-product companies to filter sustainability through their supply chain tiers down to the chip manufacturers and beyond.
• Sustainability is moving up the priority list for enterprises. But it still competes with other business priorities and often comes unstuck due to a lack of alignment in data and business processes and a disconnect between enterprise-level strategy, domain-level roadmaps, and delivery.
• COP26, the UN climate summit, in November 2021, marked a (believable) shift from ambition and goal setting, towards transition plans and delivery. Organizations are serious about decarbonizing to net-zero and addressing all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, we’re attributing the gold standard to those 20% (max) who’ve mastered basic road mapping concepts: goal, starting point, plan route.

The Bottom Line: Organizations need to build roadmaps that align to the global context of sustainability: net-zero and the UN Goals. Thankfully, we have goals when it comes to sustainability—compared with over a decade in chasing a horribly vague ”digital transformation”. So, mould these into the right goals for you, build a roadmap, and get moving.