Change For Good: Agile Support for Sustainability Transformation in Logistics

Thomas Zimmermann is a co-founder of Berlin based consulting agency swapwork UG. This company has a simple yet ambitious vision: a global economy that works for people and our environment, not against them. Swapwork supports companies in combining economic success, social responsibility, and environmental protection. These companies can become pioneers, influencing and encouraging other businesses to follow suit. Swapwork has developed a model called "Change For Good," based on agile principles. In our conversation, Thomas uses the example of GRIESHABER Logistik GmbH to illustrate how this model has proven effective in practice.

Agility and Sustainability as Key Factors in Organizational Development

Thomas brings his agile project experience from working at the Fraunhofer FOKUS Institute, Telekom Innovation Laboratories (T-Labs), and ]init[ AG in Berlin, as well as from supporting non-profit and socially responsible organizations (Caritas, Diakonie, Landessportbund Niedersachsen). He is a certified CSRD (Corporate Social Responsibility Directive) practitioner and certified Economy of Common Good (Gemeinwohl-?konomie) consultant. Beyond his professional activities, Thomas is also committed to voluntary. Thomas lives in the UmStieg community in Bürchau in the Black Forest and loves the mountains and hiking.

Change For Good - An Agile Model for Sustainable Transformation

"Change For Good," in my view, is a simple yet effective model. The core of it consists of internal conferences in an Open Space format, based on the Open Space Agility concept by Daniel Mezick. This approach aims to facilitate change processes within organizations in a short amount of time in an agile bottom-up manner. Additionally, Change For Good implements EU reporting requirements (CSRD = Corporate Social Responsibility Directive) and redeems this effort by initiating measures for real, measurable improvements in sustainability and profitability.

The process starts with an inventory and goal setting by the management. According to EU guidelines, this requires a "Double Materiality Assessment." This analysis identifies the key issues and goals to be reported. Two perspectives are considered (see picture):

• Inside-Out: e.g., the impact of the company’s production on water and air quality
• Outside-In: e.g., opportunities arising from increased environmental awareness among customers, risks on the company’s value chain from extreme weather events

In the first Open Space conference (2 days), participants are invited to develop project ideas related to the identified sustainability goals based on the Double Materialy Assessment. Up to five projects are selected, budgeted, and staffed with a cross-functional team. Additionally, data teams are formed to specifically collect CSRD-relevant data for the sustainability report. After three months, all teams meet to exchange result challenges, and to manage dependencies ("Mid-Terms"). Six months after the first conference, employees are invited to the second internal conference (2 days). Here, the project teams present their results, celebrate, and make decisions about the potential company-wide rollout of the measures. The data teams present the collection of all CSRD-relevant data and provide an overall overview of the sustainability mission.

Living Sustainable Transformation at GRIESHABER Logistik?

"Change for Good" convinced GRIESHABER Logistik executives because it provided a clear yed adaptable roadmap for sustainability that goes beyond reporting. One of the important (agile) principles is to get into implementation quickly to learn from experiences as soon as possible. The key is involving the employees. "Sustainability is a change process that essentially affects all employees in the company," says Thomas. "If you try to push such a change top-down, you create misunderstandings and resistance." To get into action quickly, they decided to start the first Open Space even before completing the Double Materiality Analysis completely. Typical goals from the logistics domain served as the basis. "This is relatively easy in the logistics value chain," says Thomas. Ecology was chosen as the first focus area from the ESG (Environmental Social Governance) fields. Swapwork supported GRIESHABER Logistik in creating an environmental balance sheet and setting broad goals.

When the big day of the first open space arrived, 40 volunteers from six German sites came together. Right at the beginning, when swapwork introduced them to the preliminary carbon balance sheet, the attendees were shocked to see that transportation fuel emissions were six times higher than all other emitters combined (electricity, heating etc.). This gave a clear focus for the ideation phase. With great enthusiasm, they developed 20 project ideas, almost all of which were deemed legally permissible by the executives. The employees experienced the simplest approval process they could imagine, as they could now choose the ideas they really wanted to work on. Nine criteria, such as benefits for climate and environmental protection, feasibility, cost savings, and public impact, helped in the selection. The executives were impressed by the hands-on mentality in the Open Space. "This made the potential of the employees clear, showing their ability to think entrepreneurial, so that in the end the executives realized: Wow, we have highly committed people here!", remembers Thomas.

On the second day of the workshop, five teams were formed, each provided with a budget and time, and were ready to go - with another surprise! "Actually, we had planned for an agile coach to accompany each of these teams, but the executives didn't want to miss out on this task. They wanted to give the teams the necessary backing themselves and thus send a clear signal of how important these activities are to them," explains Thomas.

Now, six month later, the teams delivered their final results in the End Terms meeting. Three out of five teams have fully achieved or overachieved their goals. One of them focused on reducing fuel emissions of the vehicle fleet. By using plant remains based HVO fuel, 80-90% of emissions can be saved. This is a bridging technology that helps quickly decarbonize. "The challenge was to find customers willing to bear the additional costs of 15 cents/liter. The availability of HVO was also unclear. It is an agile success that these questions could be resolved and implemented into operational practice so quickly. An existing customer of GRIESHABER agreed quickly and 30.000 liters of HVO Diesel could be purchased," says Thomas happily. Another team managed to save up to 7% of fuel consumption by driver trainings and technical improvements. Both results prove that economic and ecological success can go hand in hand. Were all teams so successful? "It's okay to fail and even relatively inexpensive if you can make better decisions afterwards."

And what will happen after the 2nd Open Space? Thomas hopes that more employees can be mobilized for the sustainability transformation as the successes become visible. The Sustainability Week planned for the fall should also help with this. During this week, sustainability is to be integrated into the ongoing operation by deepening a sustainability topic (e.g., carpooling or language courses) with activities at the locations every afternoon, and employees can actively participate.

In the future, the results of the project phase will be incorporated into strategy development in an annual process, and the Double Materiality Analysis will be refined based on this. The process is accompanied by the internal experts responsible?for data collection, coordination of measures, and communication. And what will become of swapwork? "Our mission is to make ourselves obsolete. We want to enable companies to establish an ongoing development process that they truly own and value." An impressive attitude for agile coaching, but there is still much to be done until then. I wish Thomas, his swapwork colleagues and GRIESHABER Logistik much success!