When organizations such as ISL Engineering and Land Services and The Co-operators have a solid sustainability strategy in place, it’s time to tackle this question.  Last year, we helped the Cooperators develop a product assessment tool to clearly show how their products link to their sustainability strategy – helping to benchmark where they stand from a sustainability perspective and to track improvement over time.  This year, we’re helping ISL Engineering and Land Services to assess various design options from a sustainability perspective as they build out their engineering projects. 

This is where the rubber hits the road.  It’s all well and good (and a necessary step!) to dream of a sustainable future, to articulate goals and to craft sustainability visions, but if we’re serious about making the shift to a sustainable society organizations of all shapes and sizes will need to integrate sustainability thinking into the ways in which they deliver value in the world.  This means taking an honest look at their core products and services through a sustainability lens - and then evolving their thinking, business models and approaches to be congruent with a sustainability constrained world.  Interface is a phenomenal example of an organization that took these bold steps, and reaped remarkable benefits from the innovations that resulted.  It’s important work, and it starts with asking better questions.

I’m excited to be spending the summer months working with a group of water engineers at ISL Engineering and Land Services to do just this – helping them to ask different questions as they deliver their projects, connecting their strategic sustainability goals with the decisions that they make at a project level.  Together, we will be building tools to help the organization respond to the question ‘How does this project move us from where we are to where we want to be?’  My hope is that this work will inspire new ideas and spark new questions about how things could and should be done, that it will help the team to notice sustainability opportunities and shed light on the challenges of today.  Most importantly, I hope that it will help them to impress their clients with forward thinking technical solutions that go beyond best practices. 

It seems simple to ask the question ‘how does what we are doing connect to where we want to be?’, but all too often we see organizations get stuck in the trials and tribulations of ‘greening the office’ – or stall out celebrating good intentions and incremental progress, without really evolving how they deliver their work.  Building the tools and capacity to assess and question the status quo from a sustainability perspective opens the door to radical solutions.  We believe that this skill – coupled with strong leadership and a robust sustainability strategy – is a necessary ingredient for success in the 21st century and beyond. 

If you are interested in learning more about our Service Path for Sustainable Business and how we can help your business develop a bold sustainability vision, strategy, and action plan, please contact us or join our next FREE Introduction to Strategic Sustainability for Business in Canada webinar.