Complex or not Complex? That is the question.

Well, you know me, I am not a candidate for thriller writing and I kill the suspense usually after two sentences. My position is clear… Sustainability is not Complex, and it is important to kill that myth to stop finding excuses to delay action. We must go back to basics and apply good old pragmatism to sustainability, treating it as any other business matter.

But I am already getting ahead of myself, so let’s start from the beginning.

A few months ago, I was participating in my last ever panel in the name of Holcim. One of my co-panellists, the CSO of a major company, said: “Sustainability is complex”. I raised my hand to intervene, and because I have a reputation of creating trouble in conferences which always makes these events livelier, the panel facilitator let me speak.

“I don’t think sustainability is complex and I think we should stop saying that, as it is counter-productive to mobilise all forces to make change”.

The facilitator turned to the other panellists and then to the audience to ask them if they thought that sustainability was complex. Almost unanimously they said they thought that it was.?

“Magali, you are wrong, sustainability is complex”.

To which I replied,

“I appreciate the science-based protocol you just used by asking a biased audience for their opinion to establish that I am wrong. But I stand by what I said”.

I am not going to explain what sustainability is to make my point, because this could end up into a philosophical discussion, which are great to have whilst enjoying a glass of wine but won’t help us fight climate change.

I prefer to look at what companies need to do to drive change.

The first task is to evaluate footprint and report it. Is this complex? Well, it might be complicated because it is new and people need to be trained, processes must be put in place and so on, but let’s look at it in a pragmatic way. The Green House Gas protocols to measure CO2 are usually a few pages long and apply to all geographies. In comparison, financial reporting has hundreds of variations, and is subject to each country law. ?Reporting on nature is more complicated, but again, there are a lot of companies now offering services such as eDNA which allows us to evaluate the impact a business has on nature accurately enough to drive action.

Sustainability reporting includes barbaric acronyms such as CSRD, GRI, SBTI, SBTN, TCFD, TNFD, Taxonomy. True, these are new and we need to learn them, but in comparison, I searched for abbreviations used in finance and this is what my good friend Wikipedia tells me = List of business and finance abbreviations - Wikipedia. There are hundreds (and I actually felt very bad when I realised that I knew quite a lot of them!)

No-one questions if financial reporting is complex because we have been reporting the data for decades, and we know we can trust the experts to do so. People of my generation will remember when we had to implement Sarbanes Oxley after the Enron bankruptcy about 20 years ago. That was complex but we did it!

If we apply the same logic to sustainability, then we should “just” put the right resources in place and train them under the same principle as financials, which is what is starting to happen, and sustainability reporting will “just” become another reporting. We agree that it means putting some budget into it, but this can be done very efficiently, using the existing teams and systems in place and expanding them to sustainability. This will be much more efficient than trying to train sustainability people in reporting.

Then, we need to put in place action plans. For industries, the solutions will be technical. Who better than the local operation teams, supported by the process and the innovation teams to know what to do? It requires ensuring it’s science based, to ensure that the actions taken will have the right impact.

?Is it complex? Not really, it is just a new challenge to throw to the technical teams, who love putting their skills to good use.

Then, we need to find a market to sell the low-carbon product. When Holcim launched low-carbon concrete (the definition is 30% less CO2 than the country standard concrete), people said that there would be no market for it. Well, a “chicken and egg” story later, it was decided it could go ahead and it launched in all geographies. Within less than 3 years, this product had over 20% market share.

Is it complex? No, it is just a new marketing strategy to put in place, a new challenge to throw at the sales and marketing teams, who thrive at that. And it creates a world of new opportunities for companies.

And ultimately, we want to change the business model of the company and find a way to be incentivised to make more money when producing less.

This is the only time where I will agree that it can be defined as complex, as it touches on the DNA of the company. For example, if we want to pivot business to be incentivized to produce less, the only real way to do it is to shift from selling products to selling services, as the electronics-maker, Philipps did about 15 years ago when they started selling light “services” (or units of lumen) instead of “bulbs”, changing the paradigm and being suddenly incentivised to make bulbs that last longer. It requires a big drive from the company to adopt the change, with sometimes a different positioning in the value chain, a pivot in value proposition, in short, a new business strategy with potential great success.

So, if it is not complex, why is everybody saying it is?

As I am a positive person, I prefer to think that they say it because it is new. ?In a difficult macro-economic context, it can be seen as another burden for the CEO.

If I were cynical, I would say that it allows companies to delay action and it allows sustainability experts to protect their jobs.

But we don’t have time for these debates. We need to all have hands on deck today, technical, finance, marketing, businesspeople… everybody, because the race is on and we can only win it by running it together, as a team.

Sustainability is not complex; it is just business as (un)usual.