It’s time for sustainability to move fast and break things

“In the quest for sustainable development, the only thing more dangerous than the absence of progress is the illusion of it. Selling the business case for incremental sustainability simply satisfies the needs of the status quo. It’s time to take a leaf out of the Silicon Valley playbook. How do we move fast and break things?”

Last year, EY released Enough: A review of corporate sustainability in a world running out of time . The report started with a clear question: were sustainability professionals living up their credo? In the simplest of terms, were we gaining momentum and moving towards a future where we live within our planetary means?

The punchline of the report was clear. We are not even close. We are live in a world in which every meaningful indicator of biospheric health is in decline. Corporate sustainability is not working in its current form.

Some achievements over the last two decades are worth applause. We normalised the concept of sustainability and signed up our organisations to every long-term framework and target under the sun. We amassed reputational capital and tens of trillions of dollars poured in. These are remarkable accomplishments.

But our ability to ”stay on the bus” that is course correcting global capitalism is predicated on us continuing to play by the same set of rules that we’ve had for 20 years. Incrementalism – the idea that we should be satisfied with eking out increments of change whether that adds up to the quantum of change we need – remains the dominant philosophy.

How did we get to this place?

Paying the devil’s due

My colleague Adam Carrel , Partner, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, ?EY Australia, posed this question to a packed crowd of 500-plus professionals at the Sustainability Leaders Summit recently.

Adam noted that sustainability professionals had made several “Faustian bargains” to ensure the survival of our profession. The most stark of those was struck during the global financial crisis. At a moment when sustainability should have been the basis for “root and branch reform” of the global economy, it became the opposite. Sustainability was perceived as a “dangerous cost centre” at a time when business had to “get back on its feet”.

In that moment, we made a “fateful decision” that was very successful but still echoes today, Adam said. “We promised that sustainability wouldn’t be hard.” We promised that we would not only achieve the “immense feat” of decoupling economic growth from environment, climate and social harm, but we’d do it in a way that reduced risk and cost, added value and appealed to the entire share registry. “We told everyone we would do well by doing good.”

We made it the responsibility of sustainability professionals to “sell our business case”, or as Adam said: “We tried to bend sustainability to fit the needs of business when it should have always been that business bent to fit the needs of the biosphere.”

Squeezing the status quo

The defining paradox of our time is that, demographically, there are more highly educated, passionate and powerful people wanting to save the planet than at any other time in human history. Why isn't this manifesting in a tidal wave of change?

It is because there are far too many of us trying to monetise the last bit of the status quo. And this is why, globally, there is not a single large company with a restorative relationship with the biosphere.

When EY announced the launch of Enough, we readied ourselves for scathing feedback. But after taking this show on the road and talking to hundreds of people, we had an overwhelmingly positive response.

It turns out, (surprise surprise), that sustainability is brimming with revolutionaries who want to be part of the process of ending the dangerous illusion that it’s our job to make sustainability easy.

We asked people what tools they need as they roll up their sleeves for the hard work ahead. We thought perhaps that might be a system or a process – an “LCA on steroids”. But universally, everyone from CEOs to corporate think tanks, academics to analysts said we didn’t need another methodology to help businesses “do the maths” so we could reset planetary boundaries. We had frameworks, the technology and the capital too.

A mandate and moral courage

What we don’t have is a clear mandate and what Adam called the “moral courage” to make the difficult decisions. While Silicon Valley gets to move fast and break things, sustainability professionals are expected to present a “perfect peer-reviewed blueprint”, backed by hundreds of pilots and a “library of instructions” that tells the world precisely what we’ll do, he said.

But we simply don’t have the time for blueprints and action plans. Our challenge is not in the macro. It is in the micro and in the millions of decisions made each day that take us further and further away from a sustainable planet. Sustainability is reliant on people making hard decisions that aren't always in their best interests.

In the absence of an ethical framework to help guide people through making these difficult decisions, EY professionals are currently engaging with ethicists, philosophers and thinkers to tease out what that might look like. Watch this space.

We also need a stricter code of conduct for what it means to be a sustainability professional. Enough floats the idea of a formal sustainability ‘guild’ with specific conditions of entry, standards of behaviour and advocacy strategies. This could be a powerful vehicle to help sustainability professionals cohere as a unified bloc, and we will have more to report on this soon.

What do we do now?

Adam’s call to action was crystal clear. “When it comes to sustainable development, there are no points for trying. We either succeed or we fail.”

As sustainability professionals, our social responsibility is not to fit in; it is to stick out. “It is our job not to contort ourselves, but to continually keep in mind the needs of the biosphere, even if those around us won’t.”

If we do that, as a community, we will remind the world of what sustainable development means. We will corral the vast intellect of the global economy to eschew incremental change and to instead embrace the complicated, costly and risky transformation that must occur for corporate sustainability to meet its immense promise.

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The views expressed in this article are the views of the author, not Ernst & Young. This article provides general information, does not constitute advice and should not be relied on as such. Professional advice should be sought prior to any action being taken in reliance on any of the information. Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.