HOW NOW
A SUSTAINABLE BRANDS' INSPIRED PUBLICATION 01 Issue - May 2016, Cape Town, South Africa
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SHARED VALUE – TOUGH BUT TIMELY MEDICINE
Dave Baxter
THE VUCA WORLD
FUTURE FITTING COMPANIES
SMES HAVE THE BIG ANSWERS
MEASURING SUCCESS
EMULATING NATURE’S GENIUS
Dr Geoff Kendall
Seapei Mafoyane
Nicola Robins
Water, capitalism and the 21st century Jason J Drew
Ubuntu brand building Mark Aink
20 Things you need to know Infographic Quiz
Anneke Greyling
Claire Janisch
CONTENTS INTRODUCTION - Setting the context
A NEW LANGUAGE - Communication & Behaviour Change
4
HOW NOW WHY?
18
BANNING THE BAG
6
ALL CHANGE
30
PROSPERO’S LESSONS
40
CONSUMERS AT THE HEART OF CHANGE
42
CRAFTING A BETTER MENU CREATING CONDITIONS FAVOURABLE FOR LIFE
CREATING SHARED VALUE - Circular Economies 10
WHAT CHEAP OIL MEANS FOR VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES
50
14
SHARED VALUE – TOUGHT BUT TIMELY MEDICINE
74
WHO CAN YOU TRUST?
20
THE WASTE DISCOUNT PROTOCOL
83
PURPOSE TO THE PEOPLE
102
WHAT GOES AROUND...
86
SOWING THE SEEDS OF CHANGE
106
THE BIG WHITE BUILDING
88
GETTNG THE BALANCE RIGHT
128
BANNING THE BAG
90
FINDING THE NORTH STAR
92
BREAKING STEREOTYPES, MISCONCEPTIONS & LAP RECORDS
94
BE RUTHLESSLY SIMPLE OR FAIL
BETTER BUSINESS - Leadership & Strategy 12
LEADERSHIP, STRATEGY AND CHANGE
26
THE VUCA WORLD
32
MEASURING REAL SUCCESS
34
REGENERATIVE BUSINESS
36
PRACTISE AND INFLUENCE
48
THE PURPOSE EFFECT
52
NETWORKING THE SOCIAL BRAND
68
WATER MANAGEMENT AND RISK
78
A NEW ECONOMY FOR A NEW WORLD
140
FINANCING THE GREEN ECONOMY
144
HUMANITY INC.
BUILDING RESILIENCE - Supply Chains & Enterprise Development 22
RE – EVALUATING VALUE
24
ADDING UP
38
RESILIENT FOOD SUPPLY
46
SME’S HAVE THE BIG ANSWERS
56
INNOVATION DESIGN AND DIFFERENTIATION
58
WHAT IT TAKES
60
YOUR PLATE AND ITS IMPACTS
62
WORKING TOGETHER TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE PALM PRODUCTS
66
A CERTIFIED, SUCCESSFUL BRAND
70
WATER, CAPITALISM AND THE 21ST CENTURY
76
IT’S YOUR CHOICE
104
BUILDING A NATION
96
A MORE PROMISING PATH FOR GIRLS
98
UBUNTU BRANDING
126
INFORMATION WILL NOT SAVE THE WORLD
130
WHERE MAGIC HAPPENS
142
IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE
20 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW 132
INFOGRAPHIC QUIZ
PAUSE POETRY 72
COMMON SUSPENSE
116
LIFE, A MANIFESTO
INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION – Macro Trends & Drivers 116
TICKING ALL THE BOXES
110
BUILDING A BETTER TOMORROW
112
CO-CREATING CITIES
114
DESIGNING THE FUTURE
118
EMULATING NATURE’S GENIUS
120
A FOUR GRAM SACHET
122
GROWING SOLUTIONS
124
TRANSPORT TRANSFORMATION
THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY - Measure, Manage & Report 8
STIMULATING PROGRESS THROUGH REPORTING
28
FUTURE FITTING COMPANIES
44
A BETTER WORLD
52
MEASURING SUCCESS
80
REPORTING STANDARDS TO RISE
Published by CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE©
HOW NOW: WHY? Telling the real, good story about business, social and environmental challenges will help navigate the way forward to a regenerative future. In your hands is the first edition of How Now, a publication that unites the thinking and perspective of the thought leaders who share their knowledge, skill and passion on the Sustainable Brands platform. The content is as diverse as the conversations we are having about what it will take to lead the world into a future where business, people and the environment can happily co-exist and thrive in an eco system of well managed resources that are available for all. MELISSA BAIRD EDITORIAL DIRECTOR CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE
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INTRODUCTION - HOW NOW
The way we all communicate has shifted so radically that traditional advertising is no longer a proxy for trust, there are many shareholders, consumer interest and activist groups that can see through the glitter of promises aimed at selling more stuff. On a global scale, I meet social and environmental change agents representing NGOs, the private and public sector and brands and companies adapting to the new environment and still delivering profitability and product innovation without further impacting on the communities and environment on which they depend. Many are enabling regeneration of communities and resources once destroyed. But their stories are untold in the broader context. The opportunity for communicating in ways that enliven, motivate, and show and tell how the world is being re-written in order to activate a contextual mass awakening to the realities of the world we live in is Now and looking for a much broader audience. How Now aims to spread the stories far and wide to the global network of the Sustainable Brands community and throughout the channels our media relationships in South Africa offer us. Even though behind-the-scenes, conscious business practice is gaining traction, policies are being re-written
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and new legislation being drafted, little is actually being openly said in the mainstream media or in major brand campaign work about why these changes are occurring and how individually and collectively we can contribute to the causes they represent. You will read opinions from change agents active in the social and environmental spheres, stories of innovation and adaptation, better ways of reporting and managing outputs and come to meet a host of interesting and inspiring people who are leading the conversations and undertaking research to enable business, social and environmental game plans to be altered.
frightening. However we communicate the landscape we exist in, there has to be an attempt to make it understandable to ever yone and to enable a stor y to emerge that we can identify with and be inspired by. How Now is a collection of connected people’s thoughts and their specialisations described to a market that is paying other sorts of attention. In the words of our inspiration pause poet Croc E Moses. “Play Attention”. Now is the time to understand how to fast track the development of a congruent path to a future that is resilient, regenerative and equitably profitable.
Big dreams precipitate big action and over the past ten years Sustainable Brands has been developing a network of connected business alliances that are embracing new goals and deliverables that take in to account the impact of a business as a whole entity – and communicating how they have achieved this. My work in the arena of sustainability communications has enabled me to connect with myriad words that attempt to describe the new business landscape and to warn of future crises due to climate change and resource depletion. Some of these words are inspirational, others INTRODUCTION - HOW NOW
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ALL CHANGE
PATHWAYS TOWARD A SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY ALREADY EXIST
Transparency is driving a multitude of stakeholders to connect the dots between brands and their positive or negative environmental and social impacts. The demand for new products, services and business models that deliver purpose and profit is soaring and it’s the resilient brand leaders of the 21st century who will thrive.
From the sharing economy to the circular economy to bio-inspired design; a wealth of promising visions for decoupling growth and creating more resilient societies and economies are making their way into brand innovation conversations around the world. Big data, robotics, 3D printing and other leading-edge technologies are poised to revolutionise products, ser vices and distribution systems. Exciting advances in chemical, mechanical and materials engineering are opening the door to formulation, packaging, manufacturing and distribution breakthroughs.
KOANN VIKOREN SKRZ YNIARZ FOUNDER SUSTAINABLE BR ANDS
It’s time to discover How to tap into all of these emerging innovations to successfully scale sustainability to the next level, Now. The global Sustainable Brands community remains at the forefront of sustainability-led brand innovation. Many have already made significant progress embedding sustainability into the core of their organisational strategy, securing management buy-in and are now testing what this means at the product and ser vice design level. Novel partnerships are further unlocking new ways to tackle systemic roadblocks and bringing new business models to market more quickly.
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INTRODUCTION - HOW NOW
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ABOUT SUSTAINABLE BRANDS Since 2006, our mission has been to inspire, engage and equip today’s business and brand innovators to prosper in the near and long term by leading the way to a better future. Digitally published news articles and issues-focused conversation topics, internationally-known conferences and regional events, a robust e-learning librar y, and peer-to-peer membership groups all facilitate community engagement throughout the year. The community is comprised of over one million business and brand professionals, including an eco-system of people and organisations that support them from over 90 countries around the world. They regularly connect and collaborate on issues and ideas that propel the shift toward a flourishing economy. This community of change makers includes the world’s largest global brands as well as disruptive social entrepreneurs, along with the multitude of solutions providers, suppliers, NGO’s, agencies, academics, researchers, investors and other stakeholders that support them. Sustainable Brands conferences were founded on the belief that unleashing the best of our human ingenuity
and innovation can change the shape of business, and with it, the world. The desire is to spark new ideas by connecting people from different perspectives and disciplines with each other in an optimistic, collaborative environment to create a shared vision of what is possible. The conferences began in 2007 in the United States and this year our Global Conference Network will host eleven events across six continents in the following cities: Barcelona, San Diego, Rio De Janiro, Sydney, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Boston. This is the first time Sustainable Brands is being hosted on the African continent in Cape Town. I hope you enjoy the experience and find invaluable the learning you will receive from the detail-rich case studies, practical know-how and specific implementation tips to accelerate your business success. Plus, more importantly, find the partners and solutions providers who can help you along the way in the Activation Hub. Sustainable Brands is home to the global community of courageous optimists who are reshaping the future of commerce worldwide and you will get to meet many of them in person at SB’16 Cape Town.
INTRODUCTION - HOW NOW
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STIMULATING PROGRESS THROUGH REPORTING The challenges & benefits of sustainability reporting. NANCY MANCILLA - ISOS GROUP
Studies suggest that non-financial reporting, otherwise known as sustainability reporting, “can build public trust, increase efficiency and mitigate risks, while also boosting stakeholder confidence, trust and loyalty.” But how can one document serve so many interests? The secret lies within the underlying systems that support non-financial reporting efforts. Professionals in this blooming industr y often refer to the practices undertaken in other countries to assess best practices. Aside from seasoned reporters, many have encountered a prolonged discover y phase where they are primarily focused on understanding the various concepts at hand, defining the sustainability vision for the company and determining what’s relevant. Regardless of an organisation’s reporting journey status, we have found the following challenges hinder an organisation’s capacity to leverage the value that comes from sustainability reporting. By coming to terms with these universal challenges, reporters can transform barriers into leadership opportunities.
CHALLENGES & RECOMMENDATIONS ALIGNMENT • Couple proven frameworks and industr y benchmarks with compliance measures. 8
• Educate personnel on sustainability management plans detailing reporting mechanisms, roles and cadence for quality controls which will help reduce discrepancies.
CONNECTIVITY • Connect issues to demonstrate a holistic view of the factors that affect the organisation’s ability to create value over time, including financials and the interrelatedness to material non-financial measures. • Strengthen the relationship between environmental matters and overall corporate strategy, performance and prospects, while providing context for how data is managed and what’s missing.
PURPOSE • Assess organisational objectives, priorities and how solid disclosure will advance sustainability across the organisation and beyond. • Make non-financial reporting strategic by building on emerging best practices for assessing risks, pursuing opportunities and enabling prompt mitigation efforts. • Establish protocols to maintain momentum and leverage.
THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY - MEASURE, MANAGE & REPORT
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marketplace recognition.
continue that dialogue and demonstrate performance per commitments made.
We need disruptive, structural and fully integrated reporting in organisations globally Transparency gained through reporting has enabled groups like AngloGold Ashanti to both address community conflicts and promote the social and environmental legacy changes the company is enacting. For instance, the South African-based company has introduced a two pronged strategy for environmental mine management; the first being “do no harm” and the second “managing legacies, including historical pollution and its impacts.” Toward this goal, the company has sought approval by Ghana’s EPA for its new water management plan, sought to improve its waste management sites in and around the community, and is moving for ward with plans to rehabilitate and clean up abandoned mining sites. By recognising inherent and potential risks, the Company has established more focused dialogue with key stakeholders and advanced mitigation efforts. The sustainability report is a tool employed to
Though groups like AngloGold Ashanti have already begun to inform strategy through the wide lens of sustainability, full integration has yet to be mastered. According to published results of a sur vey conducted by the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants in April 2015, the practice of integrated reporting in South Africa has stimulated integrated thinking, but there is still a huge learning cur ve. A deeper level of integrated reporting understanding an experiential learning is necessar y to derive benefits in the short, medium and long-term. Beginning to untangle the carefully woven webs of issues, relevance, influencers and responsibilities require a systematic approach to connecting performance measures to strategic long-term objectives…and it’s no easy task. Sustainability reporting has significantly evolved since it was first introduced to the world by a few innovators in the 1990’s, but it’s no longer enough to pursue incremental change. We need disruptive, structural and fully integrated reporting in organisations globally. It is this move that will transform our ability to meet larger international objectives, realise the benefits associated with strategic sustainability and ring in a brighter tomorrow.
THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY - MEASURE, MANAGE & REPORT
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WHAT CHEAP OIL MEANS FOR VULNERABLE COMMUNITIES
Our daily choices can decide whether someone goes to bed hungry or not. SEAN MACMILLAN – PLASTIC BANK
If you’re reading this article, you’re probably aware that business has a decisive role to play in reducing poverty and building a better world. Of the world’s 100 largest economies, 37 are now corporations. Decisions made in corporate boardrooms have a tremendous influence on the future of humanity. Business leaders already understand that organisational success depends not only on creating shareholder value but in creating shared value for humankind. This raises the important question, “do you practice what you preach?” My organisation, The Plastic Bank, is in the business of enabling companies to build a better world. We have a movement of millions demanding that corporations use ethically sourced Social Plastic® to alleviate poverty and keep plastic out of the oceans. Of the dozens of organisations we talk to, not one has rejected the idea of helping people and the planet. Many of them are asking; “how can we build a business that will be relevant in 100 years?” However, many others are stuck on “what is the minimum we can do not to get called out for the harm that we do?” The latter strategy inevitably catches up with them; just ask Volkswagen. To bring this idea home, I’ll share the experience we’ve had with the Social Plastic Movement. Our raison d’etre is to alleviate poverty, so we fight to create income opportunities for the world’s poor. 10
CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
With the collapse of oil prices, we’ve seen the price of virgin plastic prices drop below recycled plastic in many cases. Demand has moved away from the recycled material, devastating global recycling rates in order to save a few dollars. This in itself is unfortunate, but not a tragedy. That is until you take a closer look. Of the urban population in developing countries up to two percent of them make their income from informal recycling. These people are completely exposed to market conditions. The recyclers who did not abandon collection are offered as little as 2-3 cents per pound of plastic (over 20 bottles) throughout much of the developing world. Collectors can work tirelessly, and fail to earn enough to bring home food for their families. They way we choose to manufacture and package our goods directly impacts whether other humans have food, shelter, and human dignity. None of us are responsible for this suffering, but our daily choices perpetuate it.
Courtesy of Plastic Bank
PL ASTIC COLLECTS IN THE CANALS OF CITÉ SOLEIL, HAITI. COLLECTORS EARN AN INCOME BY PREVENTING PL ASTIC FROM ENTERING THE OCEAN.
So how do we find ourselves marked by indifference? Do people care more deeply about creating shareholder value than the well-being of others? Or is it possible that we don’t have a real connection to the outcomes of our decisions. Of the 2.8 Billion people in the world who are living on less than $2 a day, how many do you know personally? It may be that the perceived risk is too high for you; it seems impractical, or just inconvenient. After all, how could a Vice President in London or New York even begin to address the challenge of global poverty? This is where social enterprises fit in. Social Enterprises are willing to tolerate risk that large enterprises cannot always justify. We are on the ground, ever y day, in some of the most destitute neighbourhoods imaginable, and we are revealing the value of discarded plastic and discounted people. Creating value for shareholders and creating value for society do not have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, there’s mounting evidence that business can be good for society, the environment and shareholder value, all at the same time. The separation between the boardroom and the bottom billions is illusor y. A more beautiful world is waiting to be created. Let us figure this out together.
Courtesy of Plastic Bank
SHERL AND JEAN BAPTISTE, A PL ASTIC BANK EMPLOYEE, WATCHING THE SUN SET OVER THE DELMAS 31 NEIGHBOURHOOD OF PORT-AU-PRINCE.
CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
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LEADERSHIP, STRATEGY AND CHANGE
Five key learnings and ideas for corporate sustainability leaders and boards of directors to embrace change. DAVIDE STRONATI – MOTT MACDONALD
With a strong interest and personal passion on leadership, strategy and sustainability, I have been working and researching in Corporate Sustainability for 15 years on a global basis. This background gave me the opportunity to live both sides of the Corporate Sustainability world; as an advisor and as a first role player. In this article I want to share a simple analysis of my experience that may be helpful for Corporate Sustainability leaders and for any senior director that is committed to embracing ‘sustainability’ as a strategy for company renewal.
TOUGH For the vast majority of stakeholders you want to influence, the instinctive reaction associated to sustainability is still related to ‘hugging trees’ with costly environmental and social initiatives undertaken. Nonetheless, expectations are high in terms of delivering positive business results and winning awards to be recognised among the best.
MUCH TOUGHER Once expectations around sustainability become clearer and a vision, action plan and targets are set alongside the reporting mechanisms to track progress, the Corporate Sustainability leader is completely dependent on others to realise this vision and generally with only moderate to informal power to do so. In other words, you are alone in 12
BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
pushing the company to deliver its sustainability mandate.
TREACHEROUSLY TOUGH As you get success and traction on the sustainability strategy by taking company’s representatives on board, winning clients and gaining recognition, the remaining part of the company may go against you, showing resistance to change and a hidden aversion towards you and the message you bring.
REWARDING When an influential Executive Director supports you and the Product Development Director, Head of Corporate Affairs, the smartest engineers, the most ambitious business development colleagues and the most innovative suppliers come on board too it becomes pure joy to deliver the sustainability strategy that adds financial and reputational value.
REWARDING With this kind of support it is really possible to: • Achieve return of investments on new products and ser vices.
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• Influence governments and set national and international standards. • Energise and focus the whole company with new purpose that is more in-tune with main stakeholders and societal issues, leading to a strategic renewal of the company’s offer. Hence, “leadership” and “strategy” are necessar y. But they need to have “change” as an additional dimension, as it is ver y much a matter of changing what sustainability means and understanding how it can deliver value for organisations. The vision, strategy, processes and markets and management all need to align. These are the five suggestions that will enable change to be embraced. 1) THE CORPOR ATE SUSTAINABILIT Y LEADER DOES NOT DELIVER THE SUSTAINABILIT Y STR ATEGY It is the company that delivers the sustainability strategy. The Corporate Sustainability leader is the change agent, empowering and enabling colleagues to deliver efficiencies and unleash innovation inspired by new thinking.
They will define it with you and become precious allies in delivering the change. 3) SET AUDACIOUS GOALS AND LEAD THROUGH UNCERTAINT Y If you really want to unleash all the power that sustainability has you need to think in terms of what you want to achieve, not what you can achieve. 4) ASK, LISTEN AND DEMAND FROM THE SUPPLY CHAIN Each representative of your supply chain is a R&D centre ready to help you. Share your vision and goals and ask them to be a part of your journey. You will be surprised by what you can achieve together. 5) DEFINE, CAPTURE AND COMMUNICATE You would miss the biggest change element and reward of all if you follow all the previous four suggestions but not define, capture and communicate the value added by sustainability practise. This is fundamental for further internal change and for a positive ripple effect in the market place.
2) INVOLVE YOUR STAKEHOLDERS (CEOs INCLUDED) Sustainability has so many different meanings to different people, which is why you need to understand what it means to your key stakeholders and what their expectations are.
BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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SHARED VALUE – TOUGH BUT TIMELY MEDICINE
Solutions are to be found in the problems but how many businesses can face the facts? NICOLA ROBINS – INCITE
When in hot water, take a bath. To many westerners, this Chinese saying is nonsensical. Yet it accords with a fundamental African way of thinking: when faced with something profoundly troubling, the solution lies in a deeper experience of that very state. My own encounter with this logic came after three years of tr ying to solve a health problem with the help of western medicine. Frustration eventually led me to African practitioners. The diagnosis required me to take medicines that would not remove my problem, but would actually intensify it. That, according to African doctors, is the way to deal with certain intractable problems: by intensifying your experience of them, you wake up the part of you that is powerful enough to become the solution. It was a tough and scar y option, but I – and my health – have never looked back. Shared value adopts a similar logic, which perhaps explains why it has found greater traction as a pithy phrase in annual reports than as an operational reality. When faced with intractable societal problems – such as poverty, unemployment or climate change – most firms seek to avoid, mitigate or insulate themselves as much as possible. But risk-based logic runs dr y when we realise there’s a tax to pay – somewhere down the line – for disconnecting from what sustains our lives and businesses. Some day, some stakeholder, some community, perhaps even the earth,
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CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
will present the bill. And the longer we wait, the bigger it’s likely to be. Shared value is a business strategy that seeks business opportunity – at scale – in societal challenges. At first pass, it hardly sounds like a great leap: business has always responded to needs – sometimes even creating them when they don’t exist. But shared value’s starting point is societal need – not consumer need. And that nuance makes all the difference. It introduces a radical shift in the value proposition and a new starting point for innovation.
The solution lies in embracing the problem, not seeking to avoid it
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When trade liberalisation followed South Africa’s membership of the World Trade Organisation in 1995, SA fashion retailers began a massive offshore drive that was duly fed by China’s entr y onto the world market. Over the next decade, our clothing manufacturing sector effectively collapsed. Close to 38% of clothing and textile workers lost their jobs between 1996 and 2005 . The tax hit retailers a few years later in the form of longer lead times, currency fluctuations, questionable quality, reliability of supply and logistical challenges. In this context, the shared value solution is painfully obvious. By helping to restore local manufacturing capacity, clothing retailers address their supply chain constraints, clothing and textile businesses re-emerge, jobs are created – and there’s more disposable income to spend on fashion.
These shared value strategies employ different innovation patterns but are informed by the same underlying insight: the solution lies in embracing the problem – not seeking to avoid it. In our experience however ver y few companies think this way or have the courage to do things differently. Even fewer investors and policymakers have this perspective on their radar. Shared value opens a space for new business models, new (often unconventional) partnerships, new finance sources, new performance measures, and a renewed connection with social context. Although fast being forgotten, this is deep African thinking – emanating from Har vard professors – with competitive application across the world. If you really understand shared value, you’ll know it’s not for the faint-hearted. But you’ll also know that business’s usual medicine isn’t working.
In retrospect, most shared value innovations are obvious. It makes sense for Discover y to incentivise their clients to better health – they are picking up their clients’ hospital bills. Of course SABMiller should use local crops such as cassava and sorghum for their African brands, engaging thousands of smallholder farmers – as long as it does not interfere with local food security. And how logical that Yara Fertiliser should partner with government and NGOs to develop agricultural growth corridors in Southeast Africa. CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
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TICKING ALL THE BOXES
USE-IT has created a model for green economic development and innovation in South Africa that works. CHRIS WHYTE – USE-IT
USE-IT is the Waste Materials Recovery Industry Development Programme and has facilitated more than 2300 jobs in the waste and recycling sector in the last six years, leveraged 4.5 times their funding in landfill savings to the city’s municipality and leveraged an additional 11 times that funding in commercial project development. This Durban-based NGO works in project development and in the waste and recycling beneficiation sectors. Dealing in ever y aspect of the waste stream, USE-IT explore, invent and create opportunities in waste and water management, built infrastructure, energy efficiency, social upliftment, environmental benefit, economic development, low-carbon development, enterprise and skills development – all key aspects of sustainability and impact amplifiers for the new economy.
have resulted in five major awards in the last two years. The latest of these was the Greening the Future Award from the Mail & Guardian for Green Technology Innovation. USE-IT was also the first winner of the Editor’s Choice Award by the Mail & Guardian. The Editor picked this project for special mention because of “its impact on the environment, the job creation opportunities that it creates and the potential that it holds for expansion into other parts of the countr y.”
We work in the “Green” sector and have mar velled at the evolution of phraseology over the last ten years. We have admired the trends from green to blue; from sustainable to restorative to regenerative; from closed-loop economies to circular economies; cradle-to-grave and then cradle-tocradle. At USE-IT we don’t really care what you call it – we just do it! With limited resources USE-IT has created over 2300 jobs in the sector by just getting on with what needs to be done. USE-IT’s audited results last year clearly illustrated a 1500% plus return on investment. This is unheard of and unmatched in any sector of the economy. USE-IT initiatives 16
INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION - MACRO TRENDS & DRIVERS
Our interventions maximise corporate returns from strategic BroadBased Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE)
Courtesy USE–IT
QUALIT Y CONSTRUCTION WITH R AMBRICK ™ MADE FROM WASTE SOIL AND RUBBLE.
The USE-IT approach is simply to identify the problematic waste streams and then use innovation and technology to create economically viable opportunities from that waste. We look at value chain development from smallscale upcycled products right up to building entire houses from recycled materials. One of our flagship projects is the RamBrick™ Smarter Brick where we take waste soils from cut and fill operations and blend this with crushed builders’ rubble to manufacture high-quality bricks that outperform conventional building materials in ever y aspect including strength, cost and thermal efficiency.
Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) from Socio-Economic Development (SED), Enterprise Development (ED) and Supplier Development (SD) applications. Our solutions can also offer profitable returns on investment and assist companies achieve the best B-BBEE Scorecard while adding value to the brand’s Corporate Social Responsibility ventures. In this way USE-IT is leading the transition to a new economy.
The innovation does not stop there. USE-IT has also facilitated applications to convert glass, e-waste, plastics, tyres and mining waste into a whole range of building materials to replace conventional building components including roof tiles, door and window frames, cornicing, skirting boards, ceiling panels, insulation, flooring, paving, counters, piping, gutters, facer boards and barge boards. We are building entire structures by diverting thousands of tons of waste from landfill and creating thousands of jobs. From a corporate sustainability perspective USE-IT also has a unique offering in that we are able to save companies money by minimising their waste costs or assisting in zerowaste objectives. Additionally, our inter ventions maximise corporate returns from strategic Broad-Based Black INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION - MACRO TRENDS & DRIVERS
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BANNING THE BAG
Millions and millions of bags end up in landfills; about time for a change. HAYLEY MCLELLAN – TWO OCEANS AQUARIUM
Banning the plastic shopping bag is a growing trend as shoppers become more aware of the impacts these ‘throw-away’ items are having on the environment.
LEADING THE WAY If we search for an African leader in banning the bag it is the Rwandan Government who boldly paved the way by successfully banning plastic shopping bags as far back as 2008. Visitors landing at Kigali International Airport are summarily warned that plastic bags will be confiscated, and it’s not just cheap talk either. More recently Mauritius joined the bag banners and Maputo followed shortly thereafter in early Februar y 2016. There is now a growing list of countries, cities and towns which have acknowledged the excessive use, sheer mindless waste and serious damage to the environment done by the ubiquitous plastic shopping bag. Var ying approaches have been attempted to curb the estimated one trillion plastic shopping bags used world-wide ever y year. Some countries have recorded decreases through the introduction of levies and others simply by stamping out the availability of the bag altogether.
WHAT ARE THE FACTS?
to contemplate but the figures give a glimpse into the stark reality of why the bag must go.
To inspire action for the future well-being of our oceans South African consumers use approximately 8 billion plastic shopping bags annually. About 96% end up in landfill and an insignificant percentage of the remainder are either recycled or reused. With an approximate working lifespan of only 20 minutes, from cashier to home, it is confounding that we would discard this bag to landfill where it can last for up to a thousand years. The animal species that perish via plastic bag ingestion range from birds to dolphins, whales, cows, turtles and even crocodiles in rivers and camels in the desert.
Like any daily convenience, foregoing something as simple as a plastic shopping bag can initially seem just too much 18
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
At home, once the shopping is unpacked, the plastic bags are either thrown away or used as bin liners. Either way, the bags end up in landfill. However, this is not where they always remain.
When an animal swallows a plastic bag its digestive system is blocked and the animal can die from starvation or complications. Plastic that ends up in the ocean has a negative effect on marine life and the food chain.
Courtesy rethinkthebag.org
THE PLASTIC BAG LEVY – WHERE IS IT BEING SPENT? The plastic bag lev y, introduced in 2004, has frustratingly and fraudulently disappeared into government coffers with no accountability to consumers coughing up this tax eight billion times per year. Flaunted as an environmental tax the R1.2 billion wealth, collected between 2004 and 2014, reveals that a mere R200 million was spent on conser vation-related needs during that decade. The 2016 budget reveals an increase from 6c to 8c in the bag lev y. One does not need to be a magician to equate this 2c lev y rise to an extra R160 million into the same black hole year after year. A campaign to ban plastic shopping bags in South Africa The Rethink the Bag campaign was officially launched as a Two Oceans Aquarium environmental focus in March 2011. As a marine establishment which states in its mission “To inspire action for the future well-being of our oceans” it is the action of refusing plastic shopping bags, and choosing reusable shopping bags, which is called for here. The vision of the campaign is a plastic shopping bag-free South Africa with a mission to educate and drive behaviour change amongst all role-players (consumers, retailers and government).
The objective is to develop successful partner projects which increase exposure for the campaign, create local employment via non-plastic shopping bag production and facilitate meaningful and effective campaign engagement with retailers to drive plastic shopping bag-free stores. It inspires consumers to become ambassadors for the cause and motivate others and facilitates legislative change at city and local government level eventually leading to implementation of a revised plastic shopping bag law at a national level.
WHAT YOU CAN DO 1) Make the personal commitment to say No to plastic shopping bags 2) Keep reusable bags close to hand 3) Sign the online petition 4) Speak to your local retailers, insisting they promote reusable bags over plastic ones 5) Have this conversation wherever you can – the office, schools, social media and even chatting with friends
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THE WASTE DISCOUNT PROTOCOL
Turning what we throw away into a tangible asset is what it takes to create economies that are based on regenerative systems. DONALD THOMPSON – THE CENTER OF REGENERATIVE DESIGN AND COLLABORATION (CDRDC)
During the past 30 years I have been recognised as an innovator in multiple areas of social reform, environmental preservation and commercial product design. My work and long term commitment to social housing and environmental conser vation has given me opportunities to develop beneficial working relationships with governments and various multinational corporations. Early on I was a great proponent of Corporate Social Responsibility and as a result was awarded a Presidential Decree for the Techos De Paz programme (Residences of Peace - 1996) which helped recognise social housing as a national priority under the law. The Decree created a mutual benefit between foreign investment and the region’s housing deficit; a relationship that became known as Social Symbiosis. As a result of this important work, Bovis Lend Lease and I conducted one of the largest studies ever on the needs for low income housing in Latin America and co-developed the Mortgage Preparation Program which enabled a lease- to- own home financing option. It was this focus on providing access to affordable yet quality housing, coupled with a deep concern over beach litter that provided the design basis for the patented AGUA “Bottle to Tile” Out-Cycling project. CRDC also founded and manages the non profit Ocean Symphony Volunteer 20
CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
Program, which began in 2006 as a small classical music school for underprivileged children. The Harmony Music School later became part of the National Music System (SINEM) which provides musical enrichment to hundreds of Costa Rican youths across the countr y. Ocean Symphony is currently working with the University Nacional, with a focus on community economic development, beach clean-ups, and mangrove reforestation.
Recover, Enrich, Appreciate and Prosper is a biomimicry model In order to meet the multiple challenges that our future generations will now face, it is not enough to “sustain” and our efforts need to follow nature’s example and become more regenerative. We will need to strive for the 2+2>4 scenarios in all that we develop and design. In response
Courtesy Donald Thompson
PET BOTTLES ARE TURNED INTO TILES USED IN LOW COST HOUSING.
to this challenge CRDC has created it’s zero-waste design protocol and circular business model. The REAP model which is an abbreviation for Recover, Enrich, Appreciate and Prosper is a biomimicr y model fostering an infinity loop connecting the interdependence of input and output as intersecting cycles, synergistically co-nurturing a balanced and expanding zero waste growth. A tangible example of REAP can be seen in transferring this abstract concept to the specific “bottle to tile” project. Empty water bottles are recovered before becoming a down-cycle product or even an environmental contaminant. They are then turned into a high quality product by making tiles out of them and then using these tiles for housing for people living below the breadline. This ensures a level of prosperity for all stakeholders because the waste stream of the PET bottle has now become the value stream for the roof tile. CRDC calls this predesigned material flow the Waste Discount Protocol.
Design Award.
The waste stream of the PET bottle has now become the value stream for the roof tile I am currently collaborating with Habitat for Humanity to create a unique international social housing option utilising the REAP circular business model and the University of Costa Rica on a new zero-waste approach to coffee production utilizing CRDC’s Waste Discount Protocol.
During the last few months the new “REAP” business model was selected as one of 7 Peoples Choice finalists in the World Economic Forums Circularity Awards and was awarded a Sustainable Leadership award by the World Sustainability Congress. Our unique “bottle to tile’ work won the most Sustainable Design in the Global Packaging CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
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RE-EVALUATING VALUE
How can supply chain management create a new sense of purpose and economy? DR JAISHEILA RAJPUT – TOMA–NOW
As South Africa experiences mounting pressure for the need for economic development, job creation and the development of a skilled labour force; sustainability and the development of the green economy seems far from reality. In tough economic conditions, there tends to be a contraction of sustainability related activities. However, there are a growing number of companies that recognise that a new, more robust approach is needed. Part of this movement has seen a focus on the supply chain and in particular, the value chain, not just for risk mitigation but also for the creation of opportunity. Development of the value chain allows for a heightened focus on key areas that impact business and industr y development. It specifically focuses on the parts of the supply chain where real value is added to the final product or ser vice.
FARMING FOR THE FUTURE Why sustainable value chain development is important for emerging markets: • It offers a pragmatic approach to embedding sustainability as a true value-add. • Competitiveness. Sustainability is no longer a luxur y item. It’s here to stay. • It’s robust with solutions developed beyond constraints and scarcity. • It gives a big picture approach rather than dealing with isolated impacts.
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In a press inter view after South Africa’s Budget Speech 2016, Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan remarked on the importance of business looking at their supply and value chains for growth and development opportunities. Developing value chains allow organisations to take ownership of practical topics that impact their business.
DEVELOPING THE BUSINESS CASE An example of creating opportunities to identify new markets and ways to expand with the ability for collaborative innovations lies in the waste economy. Waste is now a commodity and as such, needs to be recovered and recycled but also has to have a market to input in to. To be viable, it needs to have a defined steady stream of waste, converters and buyers which is what makes up the value chain. Without this you cannot justify setting up new sytems, factories, skills and expertise to process materials.
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BIOMASS APPLICATION VALUE CHAIN It has been estimated that small business can contribute to local pollution l evels by as much as 70%, generating as much as 60% of commercial waste and contributing between 40 and 45% to air emissions, industrial water a nd energy consumption.
1.) ALIEN VEGETATION BIOMASS
TRUNKS
2.) PROCESS BIOMASS
CHIPS ENERGY TIMBER & FIBER CARBON & COMPOST
3.) LOGISITICS
4.) MANUFACTURING
DEBRIS 5.) END PRODUCT Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
GUARANTEED SUPPLY AND BRAND REPUTATION Sea Har vest in Saldanha Bay has managed to successfully tap into the waste value chain by converting their typical, traditional waste management system into a waste economy. They have significantly decreased their waste to landfill by beneficiation of food residue such as fish skin and bones into fishmeal and animal feed. They work together with their packaging suppliers to recycle packaging waste; a previous limitation due to the type of packaging used.
Waste is now a commodity and as such, needs to be recovered and recycled An extension of the waste economy lies with big brand owners looking to increase the amount of recycled content in their production processes and products. Industr y bodies like the polyolefin plastic industr y recycling body,
Polyco, can play a pivotal role to ensure guaranteed supply of recycled content. They are able to identify gaps in the industr y value chain, whether in skills, expertise or equipment. Having a responsible partner like Polyco, screening and developing players throughout the value chain ensures responsible industr y growth and confidence amongst brand owners, leading to a healthy, dynamic market place.
TAKING AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH W WF South Africa is actively working on the development of the water value chain as a way of addressing water scarcity in South Africa. Given the current water constraints, business can play a pivotal role in developing and preser ving the water value chain. One of the key areas of focus is the removal of invasive alien vegetation. Finding a suitable use for the vast amount of biomass generated is a long-standing challenge, which also presents an opportunity for the green economy. W WF currently has a project under way focused on optimising biomass beneficiation through mapping application value chains. The increased value is intended to cover clearing costs, making it more economically viable and creating muchneeded job opportunities.
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ADDING UP
Small businesses pack a massive environmental punch. CARLA HIGGS – INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT
Despite their economic significance and critical role in job creation, when it comes to environmental management and their impact on the environment, the small business sector has been largely overlooked. When compared to their larger counterparts, smaller enterprises (in their individual capacity) may have a lesser environmental impact. However, collectively the large number of small businesses means that their environmental impact is substantial. Small business are typically unaware of their environmental impacts and do not know enough about environmental legislation to ensure that they are compliant. This lack of awareness is the most significant factor preventing the uptake of environmental management by small business. Other barriers include a lack of time as well as financial and human resources. This has implications for the broader environmental responsibility of larger corporations that outsource the supply of products and ser vices to numerous small businesses. Contemporar y corporate social responsibility frameworks necessitate that corporations account for the environmental and social performance of their suppliers and partners. Additionally, regulator y mechanisms such as extended producer responsibility encourage environmental responsibility throughout the product lifecycle. This trend of outsourcing, coupled with the corporate social 24
responsibility agenda have caused corporations to function on a supply chain level and organisations are being held responsible for the environmental and social performance of their suppliers. This means that the environmental performance requirements of large corporations must move both up and down-stream in the supply chain. Indeed, the demand from larger corporations for environmentally responsible practices in their suppliers has been shown t o be one of the primar y drivers for the uptake of environmental responsibility in small business . Common practice in this regard, is limited to screening and monitoring small business suppliers and contractors for compliance with minimum environmental requirements. Larger corporations are key because they play a much bigger role in the environmental responsibility of their supply chain. In doing so they will make a significantly positive contribution to environmentally sustainable development by negating the environmental damage caused collectively by their numerous small business suppliers. In addition to environmental compliance requirements, larger corporations can engage with their supply chain with capacity building strategies, contributing to suppliers’ awareness building and training on the
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ESTIMATED SMALL BUSINESS TO LOCAL POLLUTION LEVELS It has been estimated that small business can contribute to local pollution l evels by as much as 70%, generating as much as 60% of commercial waste and contributing between 40 and 45% to air emissions, industrial water a nd energy consumption.
Index
70%
Local pollutions
60%
Commercial waste
Air emissions
45%
Industrial water
45%
Energy consumption
45%
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corporation’s policy regarding environmental issues. They can also promote efficiency and synergy among small business in their supply chain, thereby enhancing environmental performance and minimising waste and emissions.
environmentally responsible frameworks that have developed for large corporations cannot simply be transferred to small business, and a tailored, consultative approach is necessar y.
The environmental performance requirements of large corporations must move both upand down-stream in the supply chain When adopting this approach, larger corporations must consider the distinctiveness of the small business sector. Small businesses are subject to, and function differently to larger corporations and will differ in the resources available, strategies, drivers, managerial roles and values, level of involvement and stakeholder prioritisation. This will impact on the way that small business perceive and practice environmental management. Corporate
Ar ticle references: *EU (European Commission). 2007. *OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). 2007. * Biondi, V., Frey, M. and F. Iraldo. 2000. Environmental Management Systems and SMEs: Motivations, Oppor tunities and Barriers Related to EMAS and ISO 14001 Implementation. Greener Management International. 29: 55-79.
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THE VUCA WORLD
Reflecting on the journey that organisations need to take to direct themselves into a resilient economic future. DAVE BAXTER – GCX AFRICA
I came to South Africa in 2002. I knew nobody here. I left a good job in London, a lovely house, crap weather, my friends and my family. I left everything that I knew to start afresh in Africa. I landed a good job, got promotions, enjoyed the lifestyle and yet I still didn’t feel like a complete human being. In 2010 I gave up my corporate job and went to study Sustainable Development Planning and Management at the Sustainability Institute in Stellenbosch. This was the start of my new life. It has been a challenging road. With many forks, many dead ends and many disappointments. I defined my destination: “to influence companies to do things better and differently in an increasingly uncertain world”. I have never been sure how to reach my destination. I just knew that I needed to keep going, forging new tracks where there were none before. Amongst all the disappointments I have been rewarded and have worked with amazing people on fascinating projects.
BUT WHAT HAS ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH “SUSTAINABLE BRANDS”? Many global brands are also on a sustainability journey. My journey has become intertwined with theirs. We’ve arrived at a destination together, which recognises that the global context is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA). This environment brings new risks - risks that stem from Environmental, Social and Governance issues.
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Organisations need to be resilient and adaptable in order to sur vive. However, it is not as if the shifting global context is new. In 2007 a Har vard Business School professor and two of his colleagues held dialogues with groups of industr y leaders. The captains of industr y were asked to identify problems of the 21st Centur y that specifically affect market capitalism. Here’s what they said: • • • • • • • • •
Instability of the financial system The state of trade Inequality Migration Environmental degradation Failure of the rule of law The rise of state capitalism Radical movements, terrorism and war; and Evolution and pandemics
Fast for ward from 2007 to 2016 and the World Economic Forum global risk report looks strikingly similar. The challenges identified in 2007 have not gone away. Rather, in many cases they have intensified. These risks are constantly redefining the context in which companies
1
Index
ENVIRONMENTAL, SOCIAL AND GOVERNANCE CATEGORIES: THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO CORPORATE FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE.
Positive %
Negative %
58,7%
E
4,3% 26,3%
S
9,2% 55,1%
G
5,1% 35,6%
E+S+G
7,1%
*Friede, Busch, Bassen (December 2015)
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GLOBAL RISKS PERCEPTION SURVEY 2015 WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS
Water Crisis
39,8%
Failure of Climate-change Mitigation and Adaptation Extreme Weather Events Food Crisis Profound Social Instability
36,7% 26,5% 25,2% 23,3%
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are tr ying to create value. If companies are to continue creating value into the future – these are the risks that they will have to navigate and master. Here’s where it starts to get interesting for companies. Leaders in corporate sustainability used to promote their corporate social investment (CSI) programmes and their energy efficiency initiatives. Whilst both are important; it’s clear that by themselves they don’t deliver a holistic approach to addressing any of these key issues. In this “VUCA” world, companies need to approach sustainability differently They need to understand their impact and the context within which they operate. This, together with stakeholder feedback and a deep knowledge of their business models will enable companies to prioritise risks into issues that will positively affect the ability of the organisation to create sustainable value over time. These issues are known as material issues.
the organisation is sustainable. Recent research of over 40 000 sustainability reports found that five per cent of companies mentioned ecological limits in their reports. Of these five per cent, only 31 companies have set targets in relation to ecological limits. The recognition of planetar y boundaries, climate tipping points and ecological regeneration capacities are largely missing from company discourse. In order to be truly a truly sustainable brand, an organisation needs to use ecological limits to define targets for resource consumption, emissions reductions and/or as a stated reason for adjusting their product portfolio. Until organisations recognise the planetar y limits of our ecological systems and manage their business operations within these limits, the ecosystems that support our existence are at grave risk.
Organisations then create strategies to overcome these material issues. One such approach is Shared Value. Shared Value’s premise is underpinned by innovation that addresses social challenges at scale. Companies may opt to have a CSI strategy, a sustainability strategy and a Shared Value strategy. Even this might not mean that BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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FUTURE FITTING COMPANIES
Taking a company to the next level of resilience requires a whole new approach. DR GEOFF KENDALL – FUTURE–FIT FOUNDATION
It’s rare that we set out on a journey without a clear idea of where we are going. Except, it seems, when the destination is to become a sustainable business. But what exactly, does it mean for a company to ‘be sustainable’? How can we measure – and thus manage – progress toward this destination? Until now there has been no clear answer to either question. You may be thinking: “but there are no end of ratings, rankings and indices that claim to measure corporate sustainability performance – surely these set the measure for what companies should aim for?” In a word, the answer is NO. Current metrics measure incremental improvement to today’s best practice – not absolute progress toward tomorrow’s required practice. And there are two fundamental problems with using the present – rather than the future – as the benchmark for assessing performance. The first problem is that many companies look far better than they actually are. A business can score really well just by doing better than its peers – even if the whole sector is fundamentally unsustainable. That’s why the Dow-Jones Sustainability Index, (just one example) in 2015 awarded an oil company a score of 88 out of 100. The second problem is that by not putting today’s actions in a future context, we are failing to acknowledge
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those companies that are really stepping up to do what is necessar y. A handful of for ward-thinking CEOs have committed to deliver net positive benefits to society, in areas as diverse as reforestation, carbon capture, and poverty alleviation. This is what true sustainability leadership looks like. But metrics that dwell on the status quo often do not even register such bold commitments, let alone capture their full potential. So we need a new kind of metric, one that tells companies where they need to be – based on best-available environmental, social and systems science – and which encourages and rewards progress towards that point. That, in a nutshell, is the motivation behind the FutureFit Business Benchmark, a new open-source, free-to-use tool which has been under development for the past three years, and which launches this spring. It is grounded in a simple definition: A Future-Fit Business is one that creates value while in no way undermining – and ideally increasing – the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever.
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MEASURING AND MANAGING PROGRESS
Infographics: Change Agent Collective ©
developed a complementar y set of Key Fitness Indicators – or KFIs – to help companies assess how far away they are from reaching each goal and to see where attention is most needed.
A Future-Fit Business is one that creates value while in no way undermining and ideally increasing the possibility that humans and other life will flourish on Earth forever
Over the past year we have helped a range of companies – from social enterprises to global brands – to explore what Future-Fitness means to them. No two businesses are the same, so it is unsurprising that discussions have varied wildly. But on ever y occasion, reactions to the Future-Fit goals tend to fall into one of three categories:
At the heart of the Benchmark are 20 Future-Fit goals; performance thresholds spanning the full range of environmental and social issues that may be affected – positive or negatively – by a company’s operations, its supply chain, and the goods and ser vices it sells. These goals collectively define the line in the sand that ever y company must draw, no matter what its size or sector. This gives business leaders the clear destination they have been lacking; but not even the most effective CEO can chase 20 goals simultaneously and with equal vigour. So we’ve
There are goals that seem ‘easy’, because the company’s business model has ver y little impact in that area. There are goals for which the path to success is clear – it’s just a matter of time and money. And then there are typically a handful goals that appear impossible. This last categor y is of course the most interesting: when someone says that a particular goal cannot be reached, what they really mean is that it cannot be reached within the confines of their current business model. Which of course begs the question: how would the model have to change for the business to become Future-Fit? Now that is a conversation that ever y company should be having. You can download the Future-Fit Business Benchmark at w w w.futurefitbusiness.org
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PROSPERO’S LESSONS
Adaptation and reinvention is required to leapfrog environmental destruction. CORMAC CULLINAN – CULLINAN & ASSOCIATES
Once upon a time, long, long ago the activities of Earthlings began to alter the composition of Earth’s atmosphere to such an extent that they began to burn up. The Earthlings that had previously flourished and multiplied across the face of the plant began to die in their billions... This probably sounds like how someone might begin telling the stor y of humanity in a few thousand years time. However the stor y that I am referring happened about two billion years ago. In those times volcanoes roared ash and magma into the skies and the atmosphere was a burnt orange haze of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane.
creature as “Prospero”. They describe Prospero as “the complete cell got its energy from the Sun, its hydrogen from the water and its carbon from the atmosphere.”
We too need to evolve so that we can transform toxic pollution into fertility, food and energy
The earliest cells that fed off the Archean chemical soup had mutated into blue-green bacteria that got the energy they needed by cleaving hydrogen from marine water molecules, causing oxygen to be released. The concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere increased until it began to dismember carbohydrate, cell membranes, enzymes and nucleic acids - destroying cell-life. The bacteria that had so successfully occupied the planet were heading for extinction – until something amazing happened. A cyno-bacterium appeared that used a new process, respiration, to power itself using oxygen. This gave it ten times more energy than other cells and it proliferated rapidly. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berr y, authors of The Universe Stor y, refer to this ingenious 30
Prospero’s descendants continued to increase oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere but it took the Earth system as a whole to stabilise atmospheric concentrations of oxygen at below 21 percent, beyond which cells would begin to combust spontaneously. Even Prospero needed the mediation of the community of life to avoid becoming a victim of its own success. In a world imperilled by rising concentrations of
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Free Image Library
A THOUSAND YEARS AGO BURNING A FOREST DOWN TO CULTIVATE L AND DID NOT CAUSE SIGNIFICANT PROBLEMS. TODAY THE SAME ACTION THREATENS OUR FUTURE.
greenhouse gasses (GHGs), pollutants and wastes we too need to evolve so that we can transform toxic pollution into fertility, food and energy. Here are some lessons we can learn from the stor y of Prospero.
in which we live in ways that contribute to the health of the Earth community instead of assaulting and undermining it, we are going to have to evolve in different ways.
1) Context is fundamental. An activity that is brilliantly successful at a particular time and place may be disastrous in another. A thousand years ago burning down a forest to cultivate land did not cause significant problems. Today the same action is profoundly anti-social and threatens our future.
Systemic problems require systemic solutions
2) Beware of becoming a victim of one’s own success. The blue-green bacteria became imperilled precisely because they were so successful at extracting hydrogen from water molecules. This strategy worked too well for them; a bit like burning coal, oil and gas has worked for humanity. 3) Systemic problems require systemic solutions. The blue green algae weren’t going to stop extracting hydrogen and generating the oxygen that was driving them to extinction. It required another being to find a way of using oxygen to build life – to create a new driver of change. Climate change is moving too fast for human beings to evolve physically to adapt to it. So if we are going to make it through the eye of the 21st Centur y needle into a new era
Technology might help a bit but it won’t solve the problem because it doesn’t change the fundamental forces that are driving human consumption. What we are going to need are new forms of social organisation and legal, political and economic systems that promote ecologically and socially responsible behaviour instead of incentivising the extraction of as much as possible from the Earth and legitimising extractivism. As the coal and oil fuelled, ethically-illiterate and ecologically damaging organisations and institutions drive us towards extinction, what is really important right now is working together to birth the new Prosperos. That is why we need to talk about Earth jurisprudence, wild laws and entities like benefit corporations.
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MEASURING REAL SUCCESS
How does South Africa rate on the global scale of wellness, happiness and output? KEVIN JAMES – GCX AFRICA
How do we define a successful society? Is it one that maximises material consumption or is it one that has sound economic growth along with wellness and happiness at its centre? If we can agree the latter, then it is time for a serious rethink of how we define progress. For decades we have been measuring the success of our economies based on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but when one drills down into the detail of this metric, we find it falls short of providing any indication of a society’s authentic wellbeing. GDP is just the market value of goods and ser vices produced in one year within a countr y but it does not provide any indication of how this “productivity” was achieved, how the profits were allocated or who benefited from the output. By example the activities of multinational corporations make up a large part of national GDP for many developing countries yet the profits are enjoyed in the developed world. Furthermore, GDP measures short term productivity but gives no indication of the longer term human and environmental costs. If one compares the GDP of a countr y producing all its energy from renewable sources with one that uses non-renewable sources like coal, oil or gas then how do the social (health) and environmental (air pollution and water use) costs of this energy source impact on the ability to maintain global productivity levels in the future? 32
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These shortfalls become clear when we look at the South African case. In 2014 we had the 34th highest absolute GDP in the world, yet more than half of the population is living below the breadline, unemployed and battling soon to be double-digit inflation rates. So why is GDP still the dominant measure of progress? Consider how differently we would view progress if “GDP per person”, i.e how much GDP is enjoyed per person, was applied? If South Africa was measured using this filter it would end up on the bottom of the rung at 85 in the world. But this still does not reflect actual levels of ‘wellbeing’ as it says nothing about whether the wealth is evenly distributed. An average is only an average. In fact, when increasing GDP per capita goes hand in hand with increasing inequality, the result is often that people are worse off. Inequality plays a major factor in societal dissatisfaction and restlessness. According to Gini Coefficient, which measures the distribution of wealth in an economy, South Africa is currently the second most unequal society in the world.
Change Agent Collective Image Library©
MORE THAN HALF OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN POPUL ATION LIVES BELOW THE BREAD LINE.
Other indices are currently emerging with a view to calibrating GDP to align with social realities. The so-called ‘miser y index’ measures the world’s most miserable economies by simply factoring in three things: unemployment, inflation and interest rates. In 2016, this index predicts that South Africa, with its unemployment figures and rising inflation and interest rates, will be the third most miserable economy in world.
Inequality plays a major factor in societal dissatisfaction and restlessness
And each year as our species evolves, new indices emerge to provide a more rounded view of a countr y’s wellbeing. The Better Life Index and Social Progress Index monitor literacy rates, gender equality, education, health, generosity, crime and suicide rates, environmental pollution, renewable energy, ecological footprint and resilience; all aspects that give us a better senses of the psychological, emotional and spiritual wellbeing of a society. I believe we need to take note of an inclusive set of metrics to find out how to take South Africa for ward to a better future.
The World Happiness report is an annual report that ranks countries on GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity and perceptions of corruption. In the 2016 edition, South Africa currently ranks 116 out of 157 countries ahead of countries like Zimbabwe and Syria but still trailing behind countries such as Iraq, Nigeria and the Ivor y coast. BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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REGENERATIVE BUSINESS
Diving Into the history, etymology and practice of ‘regeneration’. CAROL SANFORD - THE RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEUR INSTITUTE
Forty years ago, I meet a cadre of business designers and developers who called what they did Regenerative Business Design. They had led a revolution with extraordinary success in Procter & Gamble, which gave the business world a state-of-the-art approach in producing return on investment with people and assets. They delivered earnings for the consumer products giant that were the env y of all industries, in an industr y whose margins were collapsed to below 5 percent. Their approach to innovation in offerings and business models was copied widely, but mostly without the same level of return, since they did not understand what was behind it. The cadre had already taken the same methodology into banks, the chemical, paper, and food industries, among others — each time with phenomenal success! They were the most studied success stor y of the 1960s though 1980s by Har vard and its famous management faculty: Michael Porter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael Hammer and others. I picked up the mantel in the late 1970s and now have extensive case stories of my own all based on Regenerative Business Design. You can read a few of those in The Responsible Business (I tried to name the book The Regenerative Business, but I was told no-one would have heard of such an idea). ‘Sustainability’ was hot and I was pressured to give it a title to appeal to that market. In the meantime, many beside myself were seeing the incompleteness and shortfall 34
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of ‘sustainability’ and searching for another idea. They knew it had to be more than “less bad,” which the reigning practices suggested (and still do)!
Regeneration is based on ideas and beliefs about how the world really works Many consultants, conference planners and authors adopted new terms seeking to show how they were moving “beyond sustainability” (that was my editor’s first idea for my book title). The dissatisfied folks tried out “resilience.” They revived “restoration.” Some tried “renewal,” which had been popular in the pre-sustainability days. And then a few started picking up the term “regeneration” and running
with it. It was a lot sexier and less worn. Regenerative Economies. Regenerative Cities. Regenerative Business. But using the term and understanding its deep meaning is a lot like what happened at P&G. Borrowing an idea does not produce the outcomes and transformation as much as going deeply into the meaning of the idea.
MONEY
close to us incompletely and even as fixed. The capabilities are not part of a traditional education, or even an advanced education, for the most part. Its singularity specifies that no two living entities are identical, particularly at the level of their physical and even being DNA. They each have an essence, a distinctive unrepeatable core that is never created again, except by regeneration from which it emanates. It lives and thrives or dies based on the nested wholes in which it lives. Biota lives in soil, embedded into vegetation, in a specific watershed and ecosystem. Nothing is isolated and much is determined by other aspects of the system.
MISSION
But each entity contributes to it working effectively or else it is extractive from the health of the whole. That is the reciprocity. Understanding the working of the nested whole allows humans to inter vene beneficially and not extractively.
PEOPLE
Infographics: Change Agent Collective ©
A DEFINITION OF REGENERATION A paradigm and accompanying set of capabilities that consider any life form as singular, able to express and grow itself to contribute that essential singularity, over time, to nested wholes in which it is embedded, with reciprocity. It can only be regenerated if pursued as a value-adding process. That is a lot of ideas, but it takes them all to be regenerative. Let’s look at each one. As a paradigm, regeneration is based on ideas and beliefs about how the world really works. Not how it should work but how it does. It differs from a worldview, which is how we ought to live, whereas a paradigm is what we count as knowledge. Regeneration has its basis in science of living systems. Particularly the science of life based on DNA and the ability of living entities to bring into existence a form that draws on but evolved based on context, a version of an entity. It is unique to each entity, and further, it evolves to fit the age and context of the entity, or part thereof, being regenerated. As a capability, it makes it clear that it does not prescribe a “doing,” but rather an able-ness that has to be built to see the world through a different lens. It requires education and development to avoid falling into a familiar but incomplete way of seeing, much like we begin to see those
Seeing any entity or endeavour as a value adding process means to see it alive and unfolding toward more of its essence; more of who or what it is! It leads to releasing more potential — e.g. once you know the chemical sodium cyanide has an essence of binding (most used to extract gold), you can see it as able to ‘bind’ other toxic materials and extract them. This takes a currently used toxic chemical and puts it back to its core task. Healthy soil receives a seed, which it and the ecosystem nurture.
Understanding the working of the nested whole allows humans to intervene beneficially and not extractively It grows into a mature plant throwing off food and new offspring. See it at any point in time, or studying on that phase of its life, it’s cutting it apart into non-living parts. The same is true of the human body. It cannot be segmented to be understood, in spite of what your biology teacher told you when cutting up frogs and fetal pigs. That is seeing a living process and the value adding that takes place at each phase toward the contribution to the next and to the end product or next cycle.
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PRACTISE AND INFLUENCE
It is not only what you do; it’s the way that you do it. What are the most effective ways of managing change from within an organisation? VANESSA OTTO-MENTZ - SANTAM
We all want toolkits to help us do better and - guided by them - may not feel inclined to reinvent their guidelines. Yet, blindly copying others very often does not translate into successful implementation. How one effectively manages change not only impacts the organisation you work for, it also impacts your CEO’s perception of you and I have found that by joining a community of practitioners whom you can learn with and from, helps develop the strength and context to manage the process far more effectively. When Professor Ralph Hamann from the UCT Graduate School of Business (GSB) invited me to join the South African Leadership Council and the Network for Business Sustainability (NBS),(a successful Canadian initiative) my immediate response was “Yes”. The NBS model unites sustainability practitioners from various business disciplines who – together- identify common challenges. This approach enables researchers to interrogate the questions and devise a methodology to systematically investigate and answer them, in a practical way, in order to move business sustainability for ward.
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ONE PARTICULAR QUESTION GRABBED MY ATTENTION IN THE NETWORK’S 2014 CHALLENGES REPORT Why do some South African CEOs make the shift to incorporate sustainability into their core strategy and what holds others back? It motivated me to join the research team led by Dr Stephanie Bertels that looked at over 120 academic articles and books addressing the topics of CEO decisionmaking, CEO leadership styles, and CEO influence strategies as well as the practical experiences and insights from inter views with 84 CEOs, chairpersons and board members, executive team members and internal and external change agents from a range of global companies on how to integrate sustainability into business strategy. The research findings will soon be published together with a complementar y set of practical tools to help sustainability change agents apply these findings in their own companies and to help catalyse better decisionmaking around sustainability.
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WE IDENTIFIED 5 KEY THINGS THAT EXPLAIN HOW AND WHY THIS SHIFT TAKES PLACE 1) Understanding CEO decision-making itself; including the unique perspective of a CEO. 2) How a CEO’s thinking on sustainability is shaped. 3) Understanding barriers that prevent CEOs from prioritising sustainability. 4) How change agents can support their CEOs. 5) The characteristics of effective sustainability change agents in the eyes of a CEO.
BUT WHAT OF THE TOOLKIT THAT WE OFTEN LOOK TO?
own setting.
THE SUSTAINABILITY CHANGE AGENT INVENTORY Based on the characteristics of successful sustainability change agents identified by CEOs, we developed a separate change agent inventor y to help you reflect on your own readiness to implement change and to help identify ways for you to strengthen your own capabilities and effectiveness. Once the research is formally published the tools will be available at The Embedding Project website https://w w w.embeddingproject.org
GETTING TO KNOW YOUR CEO This worksheet is designed to help you better understand your CEO including their priorities, their decision-making style, their leadership style, what and who inspires and influences them and their experience and engagement with sustainability.
SUPPORTING YOUR CEO This worksheet helps you to reflect on a set of tactics to support your CEO and help them to catalyse better decision-making around sustainability and to identify which of these tactics might be most appropriate for your
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RESILIENT FOOD SUPPLY
Farming for the future, water stewardship and climate change. JUSTIN SMITH - WOOLWORTHS
A high proportion of the environmental impacts resulting from Woolworths operations are linked to the farming and/or processing of products that we sell. As a result, we make it our business to work together with our suppliers to minimise these impacts, and positively influence the environmental and social outcomes of doing business. Challenges we face in our global supply chain include impacts of extreme weather events, soil degradation, declining water quality and increasing input costs.
FARMING FOR THE FUTURE Woolworths developed the Farming for the Future programme to manage, monitor and transform environmental performance among produce suppliers via an independent audit and certification scheme. We focus on encouraging reduced and sustainable pesticide and fertiliser application, efficient irrigation practices and soil conser vation techniques, among others. Now in our sixth year of the programme, we have 141 of our primar y produce, horticulture, wine and dair y suppliers and 92 of our secondar y suppliers working as part of the scheme. Through this programme we continue to specifically drive a reduction in water usage through improved irrigation practices, soil moisture and wastewater management, as well as broader catchment level influences such as alien vegetation infestation on farms.
WATER STEWARDSHIP Woolworths works with W WF-SA in the progression of the Ceres Water Stewardship project, in association with 38
the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS) and Marks & Spencer, to address water-related risks in the supply chain.
Through this programme we continue to specifically drive a reduction in water usage through improved irrigation practices A group of stone fruit farmers in the Ceres Valley, Western Cape, have together with the CSIR worked through understanding their own water use, planning improvements and finally implementing the first water stewardship steps. The project is now addressing larger-
BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
SPONSOR Courtesy Woolworths
WOOLWORTHS WORKS WITH W WF-SA IN THE PROGRESSION OF THE CERES WATER STEWARDSHIP PROJECT.
scale water issues in the upper Breede catchment, including urban water quality issues, alien plant clearing and the provision of more water-related information.
In the short run, the project is harnessing the experience of South African and UK retailers in strengthening the capacity of both retailers and food producers in South Africa to adapt to climate change.
Not only has this partnership drawn on the expertise of leading NGOs and suppliers to address water related risks and build resilience at a farm level, but by driving collaboration within the catchment, it is helping to address water security risks at a more systemic level. Woolworths has also collaborated with W WF-South Africa, Marks & Spencer and the British High Commission to better understand, proactively respond to and communicate the climate change risks and adaptation opportunities in the South African food system.
THE PROJECT HAS FOUR COMPONENTS 1) Understanding climate science in a local context 2) Practical climate adaptation for farmers 3) Government dialogue 4) Further commercial outreach
Courtesy Woolworths
WE FOCUS ON ENCOUR AGING SOIL CONSERVATION TECHNIQUES.
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CONSUMERS - AT THE HEART OF CHANGE
Have we forgotten that it is the consumers who hold the key to a product landscape that adds to development and growth? DR DAVID NORTH - PICK N PAY
A decade ago something remarkable happened: Business leaders watched Al Gore present An Inconvenient Truth, and accepted that man-made climate change was real and catastrophic. CEOs said that something must be done and embraced carbon pricing and emissions trading. These same captains of industr y were further encouraged when the UK Stern Review explained that early investment in low-carbon solutions would outweigh its costs and boost economic growth.
their direct emissions. Some are also working upstream, seeking more sustainable supply chains, tackling waste, deforestation and water stress. But the emphasis is ver y much on how the companies themselves will change, much less on how consumer action holds the key.
In the consumer goods sector something even more remarkable happened. Executives seized on the idea that consumers could be the key to a sustainable future. As Al Gore put it, “each one of us can make choices to change the things we buy, the electricity we use, the cars we drive; we can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero”. One by one, consumer goods companies came for ward with their plans. The world’s biggest retailer promised to “take non-renewable energy off our shelves and out of the lives of our customers”. The UK’s biggest retailer committed itself to “a mass movement in green consumption”. A decade later and corporate work on sustainability continues. Many consumer goods companies are reducing
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People want to do the right thing. We must give them the tools Somewhere along the way we have lost our belief in the power of consumers to achieve the biggest change. Some might see this a more mature approach after that first flush of enthusiasm a decade ago. There were always campaigners who dismissed the focus on consumers as a tactic by business to shuffle responsibility off itself.
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®
Courtesy Pick n Pay
TWO FACTS SHOULD MAKE US CHANGE OUR MINDS
Achieving positive, lasting change requires patience. It means finding solutions which go with the grain of people’s lives and which make them feel better about themselves and the world they live in.
Firstly, global emissions are still going up, not down. The top-down approach – whether from business or government – isn’t working. Secondly, by focusing on their own operations, businesses miss their biggest opportunity to achieve change. For ever y tonne of carbon a retailer emits in its own operations, one hundred tonnes are emitted by consumers through their ever yday choices and actions. By empowering its customers, a business can magnify its sustainability impact a hundred fold. That’s why we need to renew our commitment to consumer action.
Somewhere along the way we have lost our belief in the power of consumers to achieve the biggest change
Here is one small example from my own business. In 2010 Pick n Pay, one of South Africa’s leading food retailers, embarked on a partnership with W WF to strengthen marine sustainability. Within a year it led to commitment by Pick n Pay to sell only sustainable seafood in all its stores by 2016. This goal could never be realised unless it engaged customers and suppliers. Much of the campaigning on marine sustainability worldwide has been negative – focusing on what is being lost. Pick n Pay focused instead on what could be gained if we acted, explaining that better management of the fish stocks within the seas of South Africa could still be achieved. Working with others, the company provided customers with a simple guide – the SASSI List – which explained which seafood was safe to har vest and which should be avoided due to decline in stocks. It has been one of the most successful campaigns of its type in the world. We must renew our faith in the power of consumers. People want to do the right thing. We must give them the tools. And we need to communicate hope not fear – a belief that millions of people can make a positive difference rather than no difference at all.
The main reason why companies have lost faith in the consumer is because empowering people to make lasting changes is hard. Habits are sticky. Change can be costly and inconvenient. Consumers need help. Businesses are not always comfortable in giving this help. Initiatives can be poorly researched, strike at the wrong problem, be too short-lived or too small in scale. A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
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CRAFTING A BETTER MENU
You can create a mouth watering menu and reduce the impact on the planet. KAREN WELTER - THE LONG TABLE PROJECT
In the food industry a restaurant menu is the core product offering and showcases the establishment’s values that they aim to deliver to their customers. At the Long Table Project, we wanted to identify what makes a Better Menu and how it can be achieved by anyone from family run cafés to fine dining establishments. Our founding members, all of whom are environmentally focused restaurants and suppliers, helped us to identify ways in which we can utilise our menus to deliver a better food offering to customers. But it goes further than just food on a plate. By creating a Better Menu, we also add value to society and the environment. There are five Better Menu guiding principles that we can use to individually reflect on our practices and shift our offering to be more environmentally conscious:
their businesses are economically viable. Trends show that from a consumer’s perspective, value for money is being redefined and many customers are making choices that reward food offerings which are traceable, and offer intrinsic meaning and health benefits. We should look at our menu choices holistically to assess the impact it has on society and the planet. Cooking from scratch using healthy, whole unprocessed foods in season is better on all levels and especially regarding the health of the consumers.
START SMALL AND KEEP MOVING • • • • •
Redefine value Start small and keep moving Work with nature Use ever ything Connect and collaborate
REDEFINE VALUE In a competitive environment, restaurants cost each menu item carefully to ensure their overheads are covered and
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Confronted with the enormous scale of social and environmental issues we experience, restaurateurs and chefs may be justifiably daunted. However, small incremental but continuous changes over time will start to make an impact. Ingredient shifts on a menu, composting food waste and supporting a local supplier are simple shifts that can motivate greater actions particularly as we garner support from our customers.
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RESTAUR ANTS COST EACH ITEM CAREFULLY TO ENSURE THEY REMAIN ECONOMICALLY VIABLE.
WORK WITH NATURE
designed to eliminate, reuse and recycle waste. This requires the amount of resources to be reduced but needs accompanying behavioural changes too.
Working with nature includes allowing the farmer or fisherman to suggest what should be ser ved. Although fresh produce is often available year round, fruit and vegetables eaten in their natural seasons ripen properly and taste their best. Whatever is taken from the earth needs to be replenished according to natural cycles. In The Third Plate Dan Barber goes beyond the linear farmto-table approach to consider ‘the whole farm’ which allows nature to determine what is produced and used.
CONNECT & COLLABORATE A Better Menu is much more than the food on the plate as it is dependent on co-operative relationships within the kitchen and restaurant space, with ever yone working respectfully with each other and the ingredients they have been entrusted with. Chefs need to lead by example and value the co-operation of their staff.
Restaurants can use chalkboard menus to promote local and seasonal items as they are available and is an ideal way in which to educate consumers on the food they are about to enjoy.
USE EVERYTHING We can broaden our menus to see beyond the popular items that customers anticipate on their plates to encompass the entire crop, the whole animal (nose to tail), the complete plant (root to shoot) and the whole catch of fish (including the bycatch). A Better Menu will minimise waste at ever y level by taking a circular view of the flow of food production, energy, water and waste. Processes from ordering to disposal should be
Chefs work with local farmers and suppliers to shorten supply chains and bolster local economies and communities. The importance of these relationships should go beyond price and wage cutting in recognition of their value to the menu. Customers who embrace the Better Menu will reward restaurants with their ongoing patronage and support. By following these simple guidelines, eateries can become more environmentally responsible and offer customers innovative and unique offerings, which will turn increase their customer base and profits. w w w.lostincatering.com/lostincatering/meaning_2016
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A BETTER WORLD
Shocking labour practices may be the norm but they CAN be changed. LEA ESTERHUIZEN – &WIDER
Many international NGOs dealing with modern slavery claim that no brand can claim to be free of exploitative labour practices. In the light of a report claiming “71% of companies believe there’s a likelihood of modern slavery occurring at some stage in their supply chains”*, how can your brand start to reverse this grim situation? Firstly, we need to acknowledge that these practices are a reality. And only once we accept this as fact, can we identify and resolve these unethical labour practices in our supply chains. This is just the first step but to better the lives of our workforce, we must go further. Today’s responsible brands need to move fast – even faster than the journalists – to find urgent cases and actively support this change. But for us to be able to identify where the urgencies lie, we need good and up-to-date data. Don’t we already have this data? Well, we have auditors’ reports, which are invaluable. But audits can’t deliver all the data we need to ensure a given site follows ethical labour practices. Our over-reliance on audits until now has failed us. A series of tragedies such as the Rana Plaza building collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2014 highlight the cost of insufficient data. Over 1000 lives were lost in an incident believed to be caused by a number of factors, including unethical labour practices and corruption.
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Gathering strong and reliable data on the ever yday working conditions of an entire workforce is simply impossible in a single audit visit. Unfortunately, it is not simply a matter of generating this data using hotlines and helplines, which are notoriously under-used and distrusted. The practice of auditors’ leaving their business cards to enable workers to get in touch after the audit visit is similarly ineffective in generating a clear and well-evidenced picture of working conditions. We need statistically sound data, rather than mere unsubstantiated anecdotes or complaints. This may seem a daunting challenge but we’ve created an easy to follow step-by-step guide that we hope you find helpful: 1) Map your supply chains. Go further than your first, second and third tier suppliers. Go right back to the plantation, the mine and the vessel. 2) Confirm that all the sites are audited and check how regularly this happens. On-site audit visits remain the sole source of insight into health and safety compliance, to name one example of their importance.
THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY - MEASURE, MANAGE & REPORT
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71% OF COMPANIES BELIEVE THERE’S A LIKELIHOOD OF MODERN SL AVERY OCCURING IN THEIR SUPPLY CHAINS.
3) Listen to the workers. Roll out a system that allows all workers to report their working conditions to you directly twice or per quarter annually. This will accommodate seasonality and give you a balanced picture. 4) Protect workers’ identities. Ensure that you can guarantee anonymity when engaging with workers about conditions. Face-to-face inter views leave them vulnerable to intimidation or worse and helplines are used by ‘canaries’ and not by the most disempowered who are distrustful about who is listening.
know where to start and what needs changing. 8) Finally, your brand doesn’t need to do it alone. Steps 3 to 7 can be covered by well-established providers and this won’t break the bank. Cost effective sources of data direct from workers are out there.
5) Ensure that the results are easy to read and actionable, so you can quickly identify the urgencies and target your support and inter ventions where they are needed most.
Audits can’t deliver all the data we need to ensure a given site follows ethical labour practices
6) Collaborate with other parties buying from the same site or working in the same geographies to share the costs of gathering and analysing the data. This will also increase the support for suppliers to make the necessar y improvements.
So while this is a huge and multi-faceted dilemma we face, it can be overcome so that we can continue to drive the success of our brands and make a positive impact while we do it.
7) Hearing from the workers themselves doesn’t need to be a drain on the supplier. Generating data on working conditions should not add to audit fatigue. The supplier sees the results first. A simple bar chart showing working conditions in a large workforce empowers the supplier to
How do we know all this? Because this is what we do at &Wider.
*Report by Ashridge Centre for Business and Sustainability and the Ethical Trading Initiative (Lake et al, 2015:6)
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SME’S HAVE THE BIG ANSWERS
Shanduka Black Umbrellas – leading enterprise development through supply chain access. SEAPEI MAFOYANE – SHANDUKA BLACK UMBRELLAS
“Empowering black businesses, particularly your small-medium enterprises, is absolutely essential if we are going to transform and grow the economy of our country” - Cyril Ramaphosa, Chairman of the Shanduka Foundation. Across the world, entrepreneurship and the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector are considered key drivers of sustainable economic growth. If South Africa is to experience such growth, there is a need to focus on the development of SMEs, as well as their integration into the formal economy. This is versus the current status quo , where SMEs are a peripheral sector that tends to only be engaged with in order to fulfil compliance requirements. As an organisation that works in the SME development space, we as Shanduka Black Umbrellas (SBU) are aware, however, that gaining supply chain access and economic integration is a tough task. Both the public and private sector tend to view SMEs as too risky to do business with. Where they do contract SMEs, the level of red tape and delays that exist within big business and government (the worst being how long they take to pay SMEs) not only frustrate SMEs, but at times risk their sur vival too. So if we are to get enterprise development right (in a way that makes small businesses profitable, sustainable and able to make a growth impact on the economy), we need to work to ease such burdens.
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Another reason compelling the integration of SMEs into big supply chains is that not doing so represents economic loss, the kind which South Africa cannot afford. According to the World Bank’s Economics of South African Townships (2014)*, the township economy in South Africa, (which is almost entirely made up of SMEs) is estimated at more than R100 billion. This speaks to the economic potential that lies within our countr y’s SMEs and the loss that not tapping into them represents both from an economic and sustainable national growth perspective. Tapping into such potential is also critical if we are to finally address the millennium development goals of eradicating poverty, hunger and inequality. Encouragingly, our public and private sector counterparts are illustrating growing awareness and appetite to do just this as evidenced by the establishment of the Ministr y of Small Business Development. In the 2014 Gauteng State of the Province address, Gauteng Premier David Makhura made a commitment to formalising and promoting entrepreneurship in South Africa’s townships, starting in his own province. The private sector has similarly shown growing commitment, with programmes such as the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), Transnet’s
BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
Courtesy Shanduka Black Umbrellas
THE SUCCESS R ATE FOR SMEs IN THE SBU INCUBATION PROGRAMME STANDS AT 70%.
Godisa Supplier Development Fund and the Sanlam-ASISA Enterprise Development Programme.
The SME-powered township economy in South Africa is estimated at R100 billion The work of such initiatives is crucial for entrepreneurial development and success, as experience has proven to us at SBU. Currently, there is only a 20% success rate for new, small businesses in South Africa (within the first two years of operating) and the number is even lower for 100% black-owned businesses. For SMEs in the SBU incubation programme, however, the success rate stands at 70% – three and a half times the national average. This is because our business incubation programme allows SMEs to tap into the resources and expertise required to ensure that their businesses succeed, are able to function in the future and do not fail in the risk phase during the first two to three years.
However no matter how much work the likes of us at SBU put in that alone will not be enough; there needs to be a concerted effort across the board. South Africa needs a cross-cutting strategy for enterprise and supplier development that is fully supported by sound macroeconomic policy, private and public stakeholders, as well as an enabling regulator y framework. Some global economies, like that of China and the UK, comprise of more than 90% SMEs, who employ up to 70% of their populations. The impact of South Africa emulating such SME-driven economic structures would mean less pressure on large corporates and the government, as SMEs already create more than 50% of all employment opportunities in South Africa (2014 GEM South Africa Report) . In other words: making small businesses a part of big supply chains is not merely about B-BBEE compliance and the greater social and national good; it also makes good financial sense. Ar ticle references w w w.worldbank.org/en/countr y/southafrica/publication/the-economics-of-south-africantownships-special-focus-on-diepsloot w w w.gemconsor tium.org
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THE PURPOSE EFFECT
Much like the mighty oak is born from the tiny acorn, one person can change the world. KANCHANA MOODLIAR - INNATE MOTION
In a world beset by financial, racial, gender and environmental challenges there are a few brave individuals across the world that are making a stand and fighting to make it a better place for everyone. Ever y single woman stood up, speaking more bravely than the next. Issues of child trafficking, women entrepreneurship, gender studies and the general advancement of women in the UAE was key on the agenda. In a region known to be hostile to women, these brave individuals have enabled women to prosper. As I sat in the audience at this inspiring Women’s Day event in Abu Dhabi, I thought about why purpose is more important than ever. This year the planet is hotter than it has ever been. Millions of people have had to flee their homes and become refugees in a foreign land. Closer to home in South Africa, racial tensions have skyrocketed. People are becoming frustrated with leaders and organisations whose promises have become nothing more than cheap political fodder. Out of this frustration and chaos though, something magical is starting to happen. We are starting to see a rise in the number of people who are making change a personal responsibility. These people are getting behind real social and economic issues that matter to all of us. And if they win, we all win.
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BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
But who are these people and how can we join them? Social entrepreneurs are people who put purpose at the heart of business. They find a specific challenge in society that needs a solution and then frame the solution as a business opportunity, not a philanthropic initiative. They have figured out a way to do well by doing good. They are working on ways to make society better, living consciously, giving back and hopefully creating a regenerative model for the future. Sounding a bit like a utopia? Well, we are seeing a rise in this group, their business ideas and their unconventional stance towards business. Social entrepreneurs have a certain activist quality about them. Think about Nelson Mandela fighting against apartheid, Mother Teresa fighting poverty and so many other icons of our time. It seems that social entrepreneurs borrow from these characteristics as they rise against something in order to make a real positive change in society. We call this brand activism and it’s about building a brand that has activist qualities. An activist cares for what others care about rather than building something that is made
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solely for profit. Their fight is staged so that ever yone relevant can see and hear about what they are doing and they invite us to join them on their journey of making a better world. Now let’s bring this back to the corporate world. You and I sitting in an office, reading this article and thinking why am I not a social entrepreneur? Why am I not using my force for good? Why am I not using my business opportunities to make the world better? Well it’s because you, like many others, have probably thought that the only way to do business in this world is the way it’s always been donedrive price down, make the most money and take out the competition. Now, imagine doing all that and strategically adding a purpose as well?
We all have a purpose. It feels good when we get behind something that has meaning to us. We feel lighter, better about being a good person and making a real difference. When it comes to business we feel as though being generous, good or kind makes us look weak or like a pushover. Well, here’s the good news. Now IS the time to be the nice guy. Purpose is rising and those who succeed are the ones who dare to care for the people they ser ve. If the women of the Emirates can do what they are doing to bring about change in their countr y, what is stopping you, in the free world, to effect change that ripples across the countr y, Africa and the world?
People are frustrated with leaders whose promises have become cheap political fodder
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CREATING CONDITIONS FAVOURABLE FOR LIFE
Big business has a pivotal role to play in combatting climate change. TERI KRUGER - SYNERGETICS SUSTAINABLE SOLUTIONS
Global business is no longer just about profit margins, share values and the bottom line. In the world of today this is just not enough. To succeed a business must also strive to lessen the burden we place on the Earth and even make it a better place to live. Evidence on the uptake of sustainable practices abound. It is fast becoming a driving trend for improving a business and attracting new customers or investors. We often hear of “living the brand”, re-purposing, reducing waste and finding efficiencies. Yet this trend still needs to permeate deeper into our ever yday activities.
wealth management practice, a similar image was proposed by their design agency - an incandescent bulb, with an admittedly green, tree growing in a desiccated landscape. Not in any way reflective of the subject or the sentiment being communicated. A mixed message lies in these details.
Having recently been contracted to market an event on efficient processes that can do wonders for a business’s profitability and produce quality in deliver y, we noticed something that was a bit… odd. Their core emblem is an incandescent light bulb. Granted, it’s long been known as the shorthand symbol for an idea but in this instance where it is being used for an event based on efficient processes, it stands out like a sore thumb. The standard lightbulb that was depicted is probably the most inefficient way to light up anything, let alone considering the worldwide movement to phase-in regulations to effectively ban the manufacture of these light bulbs, their importation, or indeed further sales. So why do we still resort to this symbolism?
In much the same way, an article entitled “Missing in Action” penned by Ms. Giamporcaro*, proposes that institutional investors are never in the firing line or even in question when things go awr y. Citing the Marikana debacle by way of example, it is argued that responsible investors should seek to understand the common business practice of their intended investment and the implications to its sustainability as an investment. Particularly where social responsibility is neglected. Investors have a duty to care
Similarly, on submitting an article highlighting the great returns on renewable energy investments to a leading 50
and to take the time to research all relevant aspects before investing. It is simply not enough to just pursue business for the sake of business but rather to inculcate the long term implications to people and our planet with a holistic, purpose-driven vision. This is most prominently so in the case of enterprise development initiatives. If we truly wish
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to develop a reliable supply chain for ourselves, the long term implications must feature highly on our list of priorities. In striving to regenerate a better business strategy for sur vival and also to thrive, we can find examples of congruency between our world of work and the broader communities we ser ve.
throughout Southern Africa. Apart from the direct ser vice to the charity, the solar plant marginally reduces the carbon-emissions and operates at the ver y low cost of only its maintenance. After all, the sun does not issue invoices. As global business becomes ever more competitive, our alignment with innovative thinking and especially those ideas that are put into practice help towards mitigating the risk we all face in light of global climate change and can simultaneously bring smiles to the faces of our neighbours. Impact investors are looking for creative solutions that can help sustain and position an organisation profitably in a socially challenged and carbon-constrained future. This refreshing approach will enable ever yone to win. *GSB Business Review
It’s not enough to pursue business for business sake One of the prized projects we facilitated achieved the esteemed World Design Capital status in 2014. The donation, co-ordinated by a European project developer, was an electricity-generating solar photovoltaic system on the roof of the oncology ward at a children’s hospital. With a life-span of between 20—30 years, the free electricity it produces on-site significantly off-sets some of the operational costs for childsafe, a charity based there. This allows the funds that the charity attracts to be directly focused on project implementation with far-reaching implications to children and their families
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MEASURING SUCCESS
At the core of the most successful and attractive companies is a singular, authentic purpose that defines how it creates value. ANNEKE GREYLING - GLOBESCAN
Purpose directs business decisions that determine the way value is created and guides how the company engages its stakeholders. It also enables organisations to unify their staff and focus on a common goal. When a company finds its purpose and embraces its authentic nature it can enhance the company’s reputation, build trust and create value, not only for the business but also for society. While we believe that owning an authentic purpose is important and advantageous, we recognise that arriving at it is not a simple task, especially in a way that effectively engages its employees and external stakeholders, including its consumers. Studies point to the fact that companies with a discernable purpose are simply more financially successful and while financial success is motivating to employees, working towards a purpose mobilises employees in a way that profit cannot. To be successful, we believe that a company’s purpose needs to be:
EXPLICIT Stakeholders, both internal and external, should not have to infer the purpose from a company’s mission or vision statements. The stated purpose should be clear and unambiguous.
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GENUINE The purpose must grow from the heart of the business, from its foundations, its histor y and its values.
VALUE CENTERED The purpose must clearly demonstrate the belief that in seeking to create value for society, the company is creating value for itself. This means it should simultaneously speak to shareholders and civil society.
INTEGRATED The purpose should communicate how the company’s products, ser vices and operations benefit society. While corporate responsibly efforts can both draw from and support the purpose, demonstrating how the company’s core business creates value for society is a ver y different proposition than simply operating responsibly. This is why GlobeScan is helping companies at different stages of their purpose journey. The value GlobeScan brings to this process is rooted in stakeholder intelligence and engagement. By utilising a range of research and engagement methodologies including benchmarking, in-depth stakeholder conversations, quantitative sur veys,
THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY - MEASURE, MANAGE & REPORT
Courtesy Globescan
dialogues and workshops, we ensure the insight and ideas we deliver are evidence-rich. One of the initial ways we are able to help our clients is by providing the context for how purpose exists in the minds of consumers, utilising Radar, GlobeScan’s global consumer research program.
Companies with a discernable purpose are simply more financially successful In 2015, we asked a question of consumers in 21 countries that addressed the expectation for companies to articulate how their products/ser vices make the world better, e.g., to demonstrate purpose beyond profit. The results showed that 6 out of 10 people (62%) across all 21 countries said they believe it is the responsibility of companies to act with this broader purpose – making the world better through their products and ser vices.
In 2016, we ventured further into investigating consumers’ perceptions for purpose by asking consumers in 23 countries a number of questions to understand the following: • Whether consumers believe there are any companies making a positive difference in society through their products, ser vices and operations. • How widespread do consumers believe companies are demonstrating they have a purpose that enables them to make a positive difference on society and also be financially successful? • Which companies are being recognised by consumers as having a strong purpose. • Whether consumers support companies they recognise as having a strong purpose. • Whether employees of large companies believe their own company has a strong purpose. • Whether mainstream shareholders believe that companies with a strong purpose are more successful than those without a strong purpose. GlobeScan has all of the insights from these findings at both a global level and also at a countr y level with South Africa-specific results, and these results offer a unique perspective on what they mean for business going for ward.
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Social responsibility in the form of products that give back to a community offers everyone a win-win, feel-good commercial solution.
The concept of adding a premium to a product at retail level isn’t new - the FairTradetm movement has been doing it successfully for years. If the product is a winner in the marketplace, it’s a painless way of raising funds for the beneficiary organisation, and for the producer company to get the price for its merchandise and points for its CSI programme. Nobody has to hold out their hat, nobody has to say “no” and feel bad about it, all goals have been met and ever yone retains their dignity. Stellar Winer y became a FairTrade™ producer in 2004. One of the core requirements of any of the FairTrade™ certifiers is the establishment of a social responsibility and development programme by the company seeking to become a certified FairTrade™ entity. The FairTrade™ funds go to the Stellar Empowerment Trust, managed by a committee of workers, and Stellar Foundation, which manages social development projects at the winer y, on the farms and in the surrounding communities. Thanks to the FairTrade™ premium, Stellar workers have decent transport, a flourishing primar y health care scheme, sporting facilities and the means to earn extra income through entrepreneurial schemes. 54
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The Stellar-Greenpop joint venture wine brand Dig This! is a meeting of minds and values. Stellar originally signed up as a sponsor partner with social entrepreneurs Greenpop. The idea of networking a social brand along the same lines as the FairTrade™ system had been stewing away for a while in the mind of Leé Griffin, Stellar’s Brand and Marketing Director. All that was needed was the right brand identity and sufficient bite from the marketplace. The Dig This! brand was conceived, not without the usual amount of birthing pains, and was successfully sold into the Swedish market, where sales have been gratifyingly steady after the launch. The result is a significant regular income for both Greenpop and Stellar Foundation and a social brand networking model that delivers the goods where they do the most good.
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HOW “SUFFICIENCY ECONOMY” CAN LEAD TO SUSTAINABILITY Thinking and Tools DR SIRIKUL LAUKAIKUL , DR POOMJAI NACASKUL
It has been nearly 70 years since the Kingdom of Thailand was admitted to the United Nations in 1946. During this period the countr y has followed a development path which mirrors that of many other nations. A once agrarian based economy and community-based society founded on Buddhist principles, Thailand is now an industrialised countr y, dotted with densely populated urban areas and Westernised in many respects. The rewards of this growth, on the one hand, have been clear enough. Millions of Thais have been lifted out of poverty and enjoy a higher standard of living today, including basic security and rights, healthcare and education, than they did previously. However, as experienced by many countries around the world, there have also been costs: environmental degradation, increased income inequality and also a questionable and contentious distribution of wealth, opportunities and justice. This growth has also impacted the culture, values and mindset in ways that may be harder to quantify but are impossible to deny. As a result, here in Thailand as elsewhere, the model of development that emphasizes GDP as the key measure of progress has come under question and inspired calls for a change in direction toward a more balanced and socially inclusive approach, namely growth that measures our success as a society in terms that encompass more than just money. So the international movement distilled into the concept of “sustainable development” resonates well within Thailand.
Thailand has its own framework for sustainable development. It’s called the “Sufficiency Economy” (Setthakit Pho Phiang), after a phrase coined by King Bhumibol Adulyadej in 1997. Setthakit is the Thai word for economic activities; pho is the word for “enough”; and phiang means “ just”. So the phrase means a “ just-enough economy.” Similar to the sustainable development ethos, the King was not urging for a return to the past, for Thais to give up all their creature comforts or for development that denied growth or free market mechanisms. He recommended simply that people and likewise businesses live and act within their means. The framework of Sufficiency Economy Philosophy (SEP) is elaborated as “a state of being that enables individuals, families, organisations and nations to enjoy, at a minimum, a comfortable existence and, if conditions permit, a reasonable degree of luxur y that balances economic, social, environmental and cultural conditions.” In short, the underlining principle of SEP is on “moderation”. These days, developing a “moderation mindset” is of paramount importance, given the world’s increasingly stretched global resources. The kind of moderation that the King called for is also synonymous with the “middle way” of Buddhism that avoids extremes by tr ying to balance necessity and luxur y, self-deprivation and overindulgence, tradition and modernisation, as well as selfreliance and dependency. Though there are no hard and fast rules about this, it is usually a question of balancing needs with wants. The application of Buddhist principles, and the lessons of karma, which shows how positive actions beget positive consequences, also provided a Thailand-specific context widely understood by Thais from all walks of life. Visit us at w w w.tsdf.or.th for more information and collaboration.
Courtesy TSDF
INNOVATION, DESIGN AND DIFFERENTIATION
South Africa leads the way for other developing countries to grow their domestic demand for FairTrade™ products. ARIANNA BALDIN – FAIRTRADE
Innovation is in the DNA of FairTradetm, an ethical certification that verifies product supply chains and acts as a powerful tool for consumers all over the world to make their product choices. By buying a FairTrade™ product a consumer can contribute to best practise agriculture and enable farm workers to be better supported. In terms of numbers, 1.5 million farmers and workers globally benefit from more equal and equitable supply chains, 64% of who are based in Africa and the Middle East. We have a range of FairTrade™ certified products in the local market and are often intrigued by the tools brands use to differentiate themselves. If we use wine as an example, we see this in the interesting flavour combinations wine makers are experimenting with together with lowered alcohol volumes for more health conscious consumers. The presentation of wine is another area that has evolved in recent years and this is evident in the selection of innovative, locally designed packaging. Gone are the days of the standard 750ml wine; these days you can find anything from 187ml to 5 litres on retail shelves. We are also seeing an increasing number of pouches and box wines, with var ying quantities, designs and colours.
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Overall the wine industr y is realising how much value the certification can add to their product offering because it enjoys wide consumer recognition and brand affinity in the organisation’s more traditional markets like North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, where consumers are well versed with what is widely accepted as the world’s most trusted and recognised ethical label.
1.5 million farmers and workers globally benefit from more equal and equitable supply chains But in contrast to the global market South Africa, with its disparate consumer landscape, has required a more innovative approach to grab the attention of local
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Courtesy FairTrade
FAIRTR ADE'S GOAL IS TO EDUCATE IN A FUN AND EASY WAY.
consumers and business decision makers. To do this we have employed various strategies in communicating to consumers via their preferred communication platforms in a manner that speaks to them and does not lead to their alienation. Our goal is to educate but make it fun and easy to learn. Our journey in South Africa has seen many new milestones being celebrated and the biggest accomplishment to date- has been to work with the local Cadbur y Dair y Milk team to get all their plain and Silk slabs FairTrade™ certified. This has ensured a FairTrade™ product can reach a much broader consumer group. The second milestone was in forging a strong relationship with Pick n Pay six years ago. The national retailer continues to offer the widest range of FairTrade™ products in South Africa – a commitment no other local retailer has managed to emulate. They remain the only supermarket in South Africa that gives any meaningful support to FairTrade™. Our dynamic international team enables fresh insights and a range of perspective, experience and energy as we work with various brands from multinational corporations or small one-man operations.
Courtesy FairTrade
FAIRTR ADE™ IS ACCEPTED AS THE WORLD'S MOST TRUSTED AND RECOGNISABLE ETHICAL L ABEL.
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WHAT IT TAKES...
Developing supply chains that lead to the security and development of the African workforce. CHRISTELLE MARAIS - SABMILLER
Not too long ago, in conversation with a former colleague, I explained SABMiller’s objective to “imbed sustainable development within African Procurement”. Following a slight pause, the response was “That is quite gutsy! Not many organisations have been able to do that…” Since that time, I’ve received a number of similar responses and have grown to learn that the word ‘gutsy’ is actually wonderfully descriptive of SABMiller’s business growth to date, and its adoption and implementation of sustainable development within its business operations. From its humble beginnings in 1886 (during the Johannesburg gold rush) SABMiller is now producing more than 200 beers in 80 countries on 7 continents. The African continent is key to this growth and holds immense potential. With brewing and beverage operations in 15 African countries, the continent already accounts for 40% of SABMiller’s business. And, with the continent’s population expected to double by 2050, to 2.5 billion people, and economic growth forecasted at 6%, across the continent, Africa is rising! Growing SABMiller’s African footprint however requires us to re-assess how we unlock Africa’s economic potential, whilst protecting the continent’s human and natural capital. We need to explore how we build and develop new supply chains, make responsible sourcing decisions and collaborate to ensure that our suppliers meet our license to trade requirements. 58
In recognising this, sustainable development is a key strategic imperative for SABMiller procurement. As custodians of SABMiller’s supplier relationships, it is believed that procurement is well positioned to identify and address social, environmental and economic challenges and identify opportunities to unlock value within our supply base. Additionally, procurement has a unique responsibility to develop local supplier capacity to meet our license to trade requirements. A fundamental license to trade requirement is the ‘protection of human rights’ within our supply chain. SABMiller has set minimum compliance requirements we expect from our suppliers in terms of labour standards, health & safety, business integrity and the environment. These requirements are set out in our supplier code of conduct and adherence to the code is assessed as part of our supplier accreditation process. The African continent however faces unique human rights challenges; high unemployment rates make workers vulnerable to workplace rights violations, often in combination with low wages and excessive hours. Such human rights infringements do not only pose immense
BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
Courtesy SABMiller
SABMILLER PRODUCES MORE THAN 200 BEERS IN 80 COUNTRIES.
risk to SABMiller’s internal operations and reputation but also pose a significant risk to local suppliers as this directly impacts their license to trade, business growth and the livelihoods of their employees. Within the African continent, it is a challenge that extends beyond ‘compliance’ and requires long-term commitment from those actively engaging our supply base.
Procurement has a unique responsibility to develop local supplier capacity In understanding, and addressing, these challenges SABMiller Procurement is embarking on a journey to build capacity and competency within our African supply base to meet and continuously improve human rights practices within their operations. This is being done under the auspices of Project Blue Horizon. The project aims to continuously move SABMiller’s human rights requirements beyond compliance to ‘best in class practices’ through supplier support, development and training. We are using
information gathered from ethical audits, conducted as part of our supplier accreditation process, to develop training and support material to assist suppliers in setting up effective human rights management practices. Additionally, we endeavour to raise more awareness internally and externally by providing regular feedback on outcomes of ethical audits and to provide suppliers with guidance on addressing any human rights issues identified. This project will require SABMIller Procurement to balance long-term ideals with short-term financial requirements. It is also testing our commitment to true change as we realise that uncovering human rights infringements in our supply chains will compel us to act. We also need to ensure scalability of the project across Africa, whilst being sensitive to local context. Furthermore we need to establish how we collaborate, and best leverage, the learnings from other organisations that have already embarked on this journey. Finally, we realise that being “gutsy”, in our approach, is the only way to truly facilitate positive change.
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YOUR PLATE AND ITS IMPACTS
The consumption of animal products is the leading cause of environmental destruction. BRETT THOMPSON - FRYS FAMILY FOODS
Food is something we hold close to our heart. The dinner table is a place where ideas are discussed and debates are heard as long as it isn’t about money, religion or politics. However, the cow in the room has also been left off the discussion menu: our diet. Each year, 60 to 70 billion land animals are killed for food while around 90 million tons of marine life is taken out of our oceans . What impact does this have on the climate and global biodiversity? Let’s look at some of the facts. Livestock accounts for between 18% and 51% of greenhouse gas emissions annually which is larger than all forms of direct emissions from the transport sector (regardless of which figure you reference) This inconvenient truth is not referenced when it comes to climate policy. Only Costa Rica, France, and Bulgaria are known to have established targets to reduce livestockrelated emissions. The simple solution to climate change is to remove animals from our plate – and it is the cheaper option on the menu either. It is also not just a lot of hot air; 26% of the planet’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing which places massive strain on ecosystems. There are about 70 plant species that make up the vegetation grown across all the cultivated land in the world (about 1440 million hectares) compared to the 100 species of trees found in one hectare in the rainforest . 60
To feed our growing demand for meat, crops are needed to feed livestock. About 30% of croplands are used for feed production . At a time when 795 million people do not have enough food to lead a healthy life, we take a third of the cereal crops and about 75% of soybeans and feed them to cows, so that people in the developed world can have a beef burger (with a side order of diabetes and cancer).
26% of the planet’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing South Africans eat over 1 billion animals each year and over 7 billion eggs. Animals raised for our consumption outnumber the number of people in this countr y by 17 times. Furthermore, the majority of the meat we eat is factor y farmed with a mere 3% of eggs produced being “free range”. We are experiencing the exact same
BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
Courtesy Fry’s Family Foods
SOUTH AFRICANS CONSUME OVER ONE BILLION ANIMALS EACH YEAR.
symptoms as the rest of the world with agriculture encroaching on natural habitats , and consuming vast quantities of resources and producing waste that goes untreated.
The current trajector y isn’t manageable and needs to be disrupted. We have the ability to change, and it starts on your plate.
Livestock accounts for between 18% and 51% of greenhouse gas emissions annually Following a fully plant-based diet would drastically reduce your footprint on the planet. As a company or organisation, you can make massive strides by educating your employees on the benefits of plant-based diets while making Meat Free Monday part of your canteen routine. One South African adopting Meat Free Monday for a year will save about 91 kilograms of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, 126m2 of landfill, 235mJ of energy, and 44’671 litres of water . That’s the same emissions from a road trip from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth or enough water to have 700 showers.
Courtesy Fry’s Family Foods
SEVEN BILLION EGGS ARE CONSUMED IN SA EVERY YEAR.
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WORKING TOGETHER TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE PALM PRODUCTS Progressing from promise to action to transform the market. DR ANJA FELDMANN - BASF
After the devastating forest fires in Indonesia last autumn many observers are focusing on companies’ promises to stop deforestation for palm oil. The everyday products made, that have palm oil as a key ingredient, are being linked to the loss of rain forest and peatland. Many global players such as BASF* have therefore committed themselves to use certified sustainable palm products and trace material back to its origin. With the urgency in sight: how does the industry progress from promise to action? Palm kernel oil and its derivatives are key renewable raw materials for BASF. The oil from crushed palm kernels we buy is the basis for many home and personal care ingredients from soap to shampoo. Oil palms have the highest yield per hectare compared to other oil producing crops, and they need significantly less land to grow the amounts of raw materials needed. But the flip side to this is that these palm oil plantations are one of the drivers of deforestation. We share the concern about deforestation and the loss of biodiversity as more and more forests are lost to plantations. That is why we have two key goals for the next years: 1) We want to source only sustainable palm products certified by RSPO and make this material physically available to the market in offering our customers certified ingredients produced from this. 2) We want to be able to trace our raw materials upstream back to the oil mills.
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Neither are easy tasks because only one fifth of the palm oil produced globally is currently being certified, even though the production area certified by RSPO has almost doubled during the last five years. The availability of certified palm kernel oil is moreover still limited due to high demand. Yet we are determined to only source certified and traceable oils as our chief ingredient – by 2020.
With our partners we work intensely on innovative solutions to transform the market Palm kernel har vesting is ver y complex: the kernels are collected from several oil mills and brought to the
BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
SPONSOR ONLY ONE FIFTH OF GLOBAL PALM OIL IS CERTIFIED.
Courtesy BASF
Courtesy BASF
WE NEED TO REACH A COMMON UNDERSTANDING WHAT A ‘FOREST’ MEANS; TO FARMERS, POLITICIANS, NGOS AND INDUSTRY.
crushing plants which produce the palm kernel oil. This in fact makes it difficult to trace the origin. So in order to make this possible we have involved our supply chains to increase the traceability and only source from a list of known crushing plants.
Our common goal: To distinguish areas of land suitable for plantation development from forest areas that can be protected
actively engaged as a member in the High Carbon Stock Approach Steering Group and will integrate additional forest conser vation requirements regarding high carbon stock, peatland and the interests of the local communities into its palm oil sourcing policy. Together with these stakeholders we have a common goal: To distinguish areas of land suitable for plantation development from forest areas that can be protected. This to BASF is a solid long term solution.
But could we do more? We believe we can and do. To stop converting tropical forest to plantations we need to reach a common understanding what a ‘forest’ means; to farmers, politicians, NGOs and industr y. For this reason BASF is 64
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A CERTIFIED SUCCESSFUL BRAND
Business and consumers alike can ensure lasting success and powerful partnerships for the forests of the future. CARLA TAVARES & CHRIS BURCHMORE - FSC™ INTERNATIONAL
The success of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC ) holds a number of powerful lessons for brands that aim to harness consumers’ power to ensure the better management and use of natural resources through their informed and ethical choices. TM
TM
FSC™ has evolved into a powerful and influential partner with global reach in helping brands communicate their environmental and social endeavours. The independent, non-governmental organisation promotes environmentally sound, socially beneficial and economically prosperous management of the world’s forests. It was created in 1993 to help consumers and businesses identify products created from wood har vested from well-managed forests. FSC™ sets standards by which forests are certified, offering credible verification to people who are buying wood and wood products. Currently, more than 187 million hectares of forest (13 per cent of the world’s production forests) are certified to FSC™ standards and, to date, 31 000 forest management and chain of custody certificates have been issued in over 100 countries worldwide. As a result the FSC™ logo has now become synonymous with forest products that are environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable. You’ll find it on garden furniture, decking, tools, flooring, doors, shelves, furniture, toilet tissue, paper, pencils - in fact most things made from wood.
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A number of factors have a role in ensuring the success of FSC™. Underpinning all its efforts are the rigour and efficacy of its standard-setting, certification and labelling of forest products, including its democratic, multistakeholder governance structure. As a credible certification label, FSC™ garners a high trust level from consumers globally, including the South African market.
Consumers’ likelihood of ethical consumption is highest when it’s easily part of everyday life
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SPONSOR
OUR FORESTS GIVE US MANY THINGS LIKE BOOKS, TISSUES, FURNITURE AND SO MUCH MORE. FSC® helps take care of forests and the people and wildlife who call them home. So you can keep your life full of forest products while keeping our forests full of life.
Choose FSC. www.ic.fsc.org
FSC® F000100
Recently a global consumer research audit was done and it was discovered that consumers mainly hold businesses responsible for solving the global environmental crisis. The study also found that most consumers are concerned about environmental pollution and global climate change, and believe that they can help combat these crises by increasing their spending on eco-friendly products.
choices about the forest products they buy, and to create positive change by engaging the power of market dynamics. The certification has also allowed for the protection of high-conser vation-value forests, the rights of workers, communities and indigenous peoples. It enables FSC™ to develop markets for forest products, add value and create equitable access to benefits, from schoolchildren in Canada to smallholders in Brazil and the Congo Basin. The power of the consumer can make a difference in the long term and by choosing FSC™ consumers and businesses alike ensure that forests are taken care of for future generations.
The power of the consumer can make a difference in the long term An important finding is that consumers’ likelihood of ethical consumption is highest when it’s easily part of ever yday life and when it delivers direct benefits without having to invest further time and energy on their part. Accommodating these trends has enabled FSC™ to empower businesses and consumers to make informed
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WATER MANAGEMENT AND RISK
Brands that don’t evaluate the impact of changing water availability and scarcity are in for a big shock. DR ANTHONY TURTON - GURUMANZI
As water creeps up on the agenda of boardrooms and the public, the game is changing for all stakeholders. Change, on the other hand, opens a Pandora’s Box of good, bad and ugly realities. Get it right and you win, but get it wrong and you have inadvertent brand damage. The bottom line is that water is a critical element of any enterprise, and therefore a vital element of ever y single brand. If it is considered as a material risk then it changes the ver y dimension of its input and value. If water is finite and we are running out of it in the way we currently know it to be, then how can businesses look to the future without factoring in how water will impact the future business? Products that offer customers value and ser vice will be viewed from the perspective of more informed choice as consumers become smarter and more knowledgeable about its impact. Consumers are aware of the water crises and are becoming concerned about what deteriorating water quality means to their own lifestyle choices. This takes us into a new world in which the custodial role of corporations becomes a central feature. From an endless list one could ask which sav v y consumer is willing to buy products after they learn of nanoplastic pollution of the oceans, ultimately destroying the largest producer of oxygen on which all biological life depends? Which consumer will buy into the value proposition of a brand that claims to be caring, once they learn of the effect the product might have on human fertility in the future? For 68
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sustainability to be a key element in any value proposition defining a brand, that conversation cannot be separated from the notion of caring. After all, it’s all about the future, so how can one guarantee a better future if caring is not factored into the process? Caring in turn opens the door to a conversation on the different custodial roles played by producers and consumers of a given product. This logically implies education, or at the ver y least, awareness-raising, if the value proposition is to remain credible. Water is now rapidly becoming a key agenda item in board rooms, yet how many executives have actually thought it through; I mean really thought it through beyond it being a paragraph in their annual report or CSI projects? We have to ask the questions like: how does banking relate to water consumption? How does inappropriate packaging cause human infertility? What is the exact definition of risk that water poses to any enterprise, now and into the future? How exactly does water enable a particular company to sur vive?
Change Agent Collective Image LibraryŠ
WATER IS THE FOUNDATION OF ANY ECONOMY.
In 2000 I had dinner at the corporate headquarters of a global cigarette brand. While there, I asked a few highranking executives how they were dealing with the issue of climate change. Not one could answer beyond saying that they grow their product in areas of known production capacity, and their areas of demand are not relevant to water. I was surprised because clearly nobody had thought through the fact that areas of current production might no longer be suitable; and current markets might not be as viable if local economies change fundamentally if/when climatic variability makes its presence felt. A decade and a half later, this particular corporation has still not made any significant change to its strategic planning, even though there is growing evidence of change to rainfall and river flows.
and thus a fundamental driver of both demand and the capacity to supply. Grasp this and suddenly the conversation has to become one of nurturing, caring and awareness-raising. Unknown unknowns are the single biggest risk that brands face in the current climate. Known unknowns represent a significant shift towards better understanding and improved business practises As contrar y as it may sound, it’s only once we truly grasp what it is that we still do not know are we really making progress.
Water is finite and we are running out of it The important take home message is that water is essential to all bands, whether executives have figured this out or not. Water is the foundation of any economy BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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WATER, CAPITALISM AND THE 21ST CENTURY
The industrial revolution and modern capitalism were powered by water, the sustainability revolution we are entering will depend on it. JASON J DREW - THE ENVIRONMENTAL CAPITALIST
Water will define our future as clearly as it has our past. How we manage this scarce resource, the choices we make and those that are made for us as a result of our actions will define the 21st century for individuals, businesses and nations alike. Let me explain. There is as much water now as when time began, you can’t make more of it and you can’t throw it away – water just ‘is’. It is one of the few substances on earth that is endlessly recycled. Indeed the drop of water in your morning coffee could have been in the heart of a whale or the sweat of a slave. When the industrial revolution kicked off there were one billion people depending on that water – today there are seven billion. Just as we have mined the earth for ancient sunlight in the form of coal and oil so we have drained our aquifers for water to drive manufacturing and our industrial farms. One hundred cities in northern China already ration water – Beijing’s future as China’s capital has been under review as its growth has outstripped its water resources. Twentyfour countries in Africa will not have enough water to meet their needs by 2025 as their populations continue to grow. Our modern corporations are defined by and use unimaginable amounts of water. I would argue that Coca Cola Corporation is not in the business of manufacturing 70
soft drinks but rather the business procuring more clean water than almost any other enterprise on earth. Intel Corporation has a water recycling programme that claims to have saved 10 billion litres of water per annum – imagine what their usage is if that is the saving!
Water will define our future as clearly as it has our past However we continue to waste water on a monumental scale both in open canal agriculture in the developing world, wasteful manufacturing processes as well as for pleasure. In the US there are now 17,000 golf courses up from 4,000 in the 1950’s. It is estimated that there are 32 million acres of irrigated lawn in the US – more than three times the amount of irrigated corn fields. China is following the same development trend. Our children may
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Change Agent Collective Image Library©
well question our sanity in using our precious water to irrigate our lawns – then drilling for oil so that we can spend our weekends mowing them. The first modern war over water has already taken place. The seven-day war between Israel and Jordan to take the Golan Heights was as much about controlling the headwaters of the Jordan River as anything else.
Modern corporations are defined by and use unimaginable amounts of water
expensive resource like any other – those companies that ignore their water footprint will fail their shareholders and employees as the sustainability revolution takes hold. The real issue is what we decide to do with the poor – many of whom have limited access to water. During the industrial revolution the rich became over weight whilst the poor went hungr y. In this sustainability revolution will we continue to water our lawns whilst the poor die of thirst as we take their water to make our consumer goods and food? If we do not make better choices in the 21st centur y than we have in our past, we risk nothing less than the collapse of civilisation as the environmental migrations we will see will dwarf the economic migrations of the past. As we have seen in Yemen – people can put up with hunger and political repression– but not with a lack of water. Let’s get busy repairing the future.
We need to get busy making some hard choices. We need to move to a water wise agriculture which will require a transfer of technology and funding to developing nations. We need to reduce our waste of water for pleasure and move to water wise gardening and civic spaces. Our leading companies are already understanding that water is no longer free and managing this increasingly scarce and BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
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COMMON SUSPENSE
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BY CROC E MOSES
On the sidewalk striding through a galaxy of dead chewing gum. I’m a joybot. Attracted to distraction. Blinded by delight. Constantly on the hunt for some emergency happiness. My weakness is so strong...I’m struggling to love humans when they need it most. The majority are a minority living under democratic apartheid, held up by an army of question marks: Which way to what? Please please don’t police the peace. It’s hard to stay soft. It’s hard to stay soft when there’s a banking empire on the loose. There’s too much cake at stake. Money as we know it is the truest lie of all and it’s keeping our self-destruction in business. We’ve all inherited a nuclear hangover. Glacier tears. Life is patent pending. How to land this runaway train. Money or a miracle? Juggling curveballs. Common suspense. Reality is taking us for a ride. It’s a crash course in wake up calls. The great clarification is upon us now. The only way out is deeper in. Any short cuts make the long road longer.
Surely we’ve made all the right mistakes by now. Which way to what? A child once laughed and said to me, just shrink bigger. When a sky cracks, when a tree bows and breaks, is this just lightning grace falling into place so something greater can break through? I find myself running barefoot in the wake of midnight moonbeams. Broken glass highlights a clear-cut path to resilience. Outside, where everything is written. Page after page, breaking waves. It’s hard to stay soft in these tides of love. In this rebearthquake, a mountain always has higher ground. Praise praise for all that we receive that we don’t see. Through all of this something lifts. Dare we see we’re carrying the same mystery. We’re sharing the same mystery mercy. If making anything, make the jump, if taking anything, take the step. One step no more foot prints. While the madness still makes sense. The only revolution left is treelike, let your roots take wing. Do you plant , do you love your plant, do you know your plant is in love with you? Tree leaves wave us on. We are songed upon. Rain, rain, rain, always laughing a new love song that nobody can sing, but everybody knows. There’s resurrection in a rain river rhythm. Where this rhythm kicks in a musical peace begins. Come closer. Come closer to this open source. Play attention. Something is bubbling. It’s better than our best thinking. Rhythm is our mother tongue. We are rhythm driven. We are seven billion faces of the same music teacher Excavate ancient instinct. Get the treasure off your chest. Help yourself to happiness. Mischief is a team sport. Grow young as you glow old. In the face of so much timeache, in the face of so much dreamache, walk the inroads to the connective soul. Where all sparks meet. Destination love origin. Nowledge.
Courtesy Rosemary Bangham
WHO CAN YOU TRUST?
Moving beyond the wall decal: building brand and consumer trust in the age of disruption. JILL RISELEY - MELIORA GROUP
Corporate sustainability credentials are key assets in an age of market disruption. Today companies are placing more and more focus on the how of business instead of the what. Why? Sadly, it is not because corporations have evolved to realise that focusing on purpose instead of profit is actually better for business. Instead it is because today a company is valued largely based on intangible assets (such as brands, IP, corporate reputation, innovation, consumer trust and loyalty). Today it is estimated that 80% of a company’s value is made up of intangible assets (compared to 30% in the 1950s). And these valuable assets can be severely impacted if a company is not run sustainably or ethically. Just ask Volkswagen. Experts have estimated that V W hemorrhaged around US$10 billion in brand value (estimated previously at $US31 billion). But there is no quick campaign fix in strengthening brands from corporate sustainability efforts. Benefits are achieved from a concentrated effort involving authenticity, leadership, consistency and longevity. Sustainability credentials are core to building levels of consumer trust. According to Edelman, corporate sustainability and responsible business qualities make up 11 of the 16 drivers of consumer trust (for example “is dedicated to protecting and improving the environment” and “ensures the company addresses society’s needs in 74
ever yday business”). Similarly, Social Responsibility (or Citizenship) is one of seven measurement dimensions of corporate reputation (RepTrak). The most recent 2016 Edelman Trust Barometer found 53% of the general public ‘trusts business to do the right thing’, and there is a direct link between levels of consumer trust and purchasing decisions, consumer advocacy, willingness to pay more and stock market investment decisions. And research is clear - consumers do care. Last year research continued to find consumers around the globe want companies to be sustainable. Nine out of 10 consumers sur veyed in the 2015 Cone Communications/ Ebiquity Global CSR Study expect companies to go beyond more than make a profit and also operate responsibly to address social and environmental issues. The 2015 Havas Media Sur vey went further to quantify this and found companies whose brand is seen to improve society wellbeing and quality of life: • Gain an average 46% more share of wallet. • Outperform the stock market by 133%. • Performed 100% better against key marketing KPIs.
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Research is also clear that sustainability is a significant driver in attracting and retaining talent, particularly millennial employees.
CEOs believed future success will be redefined to address wider societal and environmental issues. But consumer trust (like corporate reputations) is built slowly over time. Recent scandals within large corporations will cancel out any brand benefits gained from corporate sustainability.
Companies need to consistently and clearly communicate their sustainability credentials and are disadvantaged when they don’t
Companies need to consistently and clearly communicate their sustainability credentials and are disadvantaged when they don’t. Research has found consumers assume a company is not acting responsibly until informed other wise. However communications must be clear (as consumers ignore sustainability messages if confused by the terms).
But current consumer expectations of leaders aren’t being met. In 2016 Edelman found the majority of consumers believed CEOs spent too much time focused on short-term profits and not enough on long-term value creation (with 80% felt CEOs should be personally visible in discussing societal issues). But many CEOs are already listening with the 2016 global PwC sur vey finding 76% of CEOs saw their company purpose beyond profit and are aware of the increasing expectations of stakeholders. In fact many
Assets such as a trusted brand and solid reputation are protective blankets in the face of a scandal or (increasingly) market disruption. But many companies need to move beyond the wall decals, catch phrases and t-shirts to provide authentic sustainability leadership. Only then will the benefits be realised.
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IT’S YOUR CHOICE
How the consumer landscape is demanding an ethical supply chain in food and agricultural products. RÜDIGER MEYER - FLOCERT
In an era of fluctuating financial markets, increasing income disparities, and mounting environmental concerns, calls for greater sustainability efforts are growing rapidly around the globe. While the topics of sustainability are nothing new to companies and brands; what has changed significantly in recent years is the approach businesses are taking. In the beginning, when brands and multinational organisations first brought the ideas of sustainability into boardroom discussions, it was triggered primarily by a reaction to consumers. With the onset of the information age it became easier for consumers to gain access to market information and as a result they re-established a connection to the products they were consuming. Consumers realised they could voice their values through purchasing power and they wanted to see better social and environmental conditions at the origin of product supply chains. This is where independent labelling and certification schemes emerged. Organisations like FairTrade™, Rainforest Alliance and UTZ offer a solution to brands that connect to these consumer demands. As these standards evolved, so has their significant influence on consumer behaviour. Recently, several factors have contributed to more and more brands being confronted with supply shortages. Increasing demands in emerging markets like China and India in conjunction with decreasing yields due to climate change, and the ongoing departure of workers 76
in the agricultural sector in pursuit of better income opportunities have made sustainability not only a response to consumer pressures, but into a sheer need to secure future supply chains.
The key issues will be farmer income, community development, climate change, child labour and gender CURRENT TRENDS As a global certification body working with many large multi-national brands, and various labels, we are at the vanguard of changing behaviours. Most notably, the following trends are to be mentioned:
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MANY WORKERS ARE LEAVING THE AGRICULTUR AL SECTOR IN SEARCH OF HIGHER INCOME.
FROM SIDE TO CENTER Organisations are increasingly putting sustainability to the forefront of business; to manage risks and protect supplies. This elevation of re-defined business values into their own brands is causing a paradigm shift, moving from labelling finished goods to adopting the values into company cultures.
FROM NICHE TO MAINSTREAM While some brands are moving away from labels, others are embracing them even more. No longer is it acceptable to have a single product or product line certified, but rather their entire portfolio, and often for multiple schemes.
FROM COMPLIANCE TO IMPACT Social and environmental labelling was introduced to provide a series of standards and compliance criteria for which players in a supply chain must follow. Now compliance has evolved to the status quo; the expectations from stakeholders are that organisations will now demonstrate their standards and certification commitments produce visible impacts.
FUTURE OUTLOOK Due to these fundamental shifts in behaviour and attitude,
we will continue to see an evolution in the tactics of sustainability. First, we will witness an increasing trend in the consolidation of independent standards and certification schemes. This is a prevalent focus for ISEAL Alliance, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to strengthening sustainability standards. Under these circumstances the capacity for organisations to maintain weak certifications is quickly diminishing and the pressure for co-operation between schemes is growing; a common high ground must be reached. Secondly, beyond labels and certification altogether – and in combination with them, is the need by some larger organisations to invest in developing customised solutions unique to their own challenges. This is evident by the growing number of private company codes and programs emerging in the market place; success will only be realised by those that can clearly demonstrate the largest impact. Finally, as the topics of global sustainability continue to escalate, so does the need for collaboration. Imperative is a commitment of combined efforts between industr y partners, certification bodies, schemes and standards. Among the key issues will be farmer income, community development, climate change, child labour and gender. Only by working together with collective expertise can synergistic solutions be realised to create a true, long-term impact.
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A NEW ECONOMY FOR A NEW WORLD
A bright tomorrow means big changes in financial allocation, today. LISE PRETORIUS - GCX AFRICA
The Sustainable Development Goals set by global leaders will give our children a world we’d be happy for them to inherit. But how do we turn these lofty goals into reality? If these goals are achieved by 2030 we will have limited the increase in global temperatures to below 2°C, eradicated poverty, reduced inequality and become in sync with living eco-systems. But in order for this to happen, the whole financial system has to be overhauled.
the other, regardless of absolute quantities. For example, last year an impressive $391bn was invested in low carbon and climate solutions while fossil fuel “subsidies” totaled $550bn. It seems we are to be willing to disrupt but not be disrupted.
It is difficult to emphasise just how much an economy that truly achieves these goals will differ from our current model. Similarly, the financial system that guides the flow of capital in such an economy will be vastly different too.
In this sense, it is not enough to allocate capital – even substantial amounts of it – to impact type investments, when the majority of capital is still funding the business models, financial products and corporate behaviours that have historically had such a critical role to play in creating the ver y issues we are tr ying to solve.
There is no shortage of recommendations and analysis on how to start doing this. Many partial solutions have been found in specific new development vehicles such as specialised funds to pool private and public assets for energy efficiency, infrastructure, agriculture, or renewable energy. Billions of dollars have already been channeled through such innovations – known as impact investment – and the intricacy of this effort is impressive. Yet few seem willing to admit the scale of disruption that is really required. The majority of global capital is still invested in business-as-usual business models. But for change to happen, one type of investment must outstrip 78
BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
The last financial year was littered with examples of large-cap companies losing significant value because of Environmental, Social, or Governance (ESG) transgressions. V W was found to have developed software that allowed it to cheat emissions testing. Five months later, its share price is still 25% below its pre-scandal level. MTN was hit with a R9,29bn fine for failing to disconnect unregistered sim cards. Sports Direct, a UK sportswear retail giant, lost more than 50% of its market value in the last year due to poor corporate governance and employment practices.
Artwork by Leslie Holland
While the message from the markets is that ESG behavior is truly material, it begs the question: how many more scandals are bubbling beneath the surface of the stock markets (often beneath the veneer of so-called sustainability indices)?
How many more scandals are bubbling beneath the surface of the stock markets? What is needed is a fundamental and holistic reallocation of capital away from old business models and a set of global stock exchanges filled with companies that create value based on alignment with social and environmental prosperity, not at the expense of it.
companies do but rather how they do it. It is perfectly plausible to imagine a mining company with a business model that aims to leave the environment regenerated and the surrounding communities well educated and better off than when it arrived. It is perfectly possible that today’s fossil fuel companies innovate and adapt to become the integrated energy companies of the future. What emerges is an unavoidable call to action for the financial sector. Too many business models are based on the assumption that global governments, consumers, and investors will do little to change the course of global development - something that is thankfully proving to be increasingly untrue. A good place to start would be to actively uncover and test these assumptions and to put them under the spotlight. This is the financial sector’s chance to change the course of histor y.
Such a world will not be full of only impact-type companies such as health, education, or clean energy. We will always need mining of one type or another; we need manufacturing and construction. It’s not about what BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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REPORTING STANDARDS TO RISE
What UNEP is saying to companies about better data for better management. BILL BAUE - SUSTAINABILITY CONTEXT GROUP
Corporate sustainability reporting desperately needs to up its game in order to align company-level sustainability performance with the broader systems-level ambitions of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and COP21, the United Nations climate change conference, according to a new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). For example, while 95% of the 108 companies researched in the report disclose their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, only a mere 8% set GHG emissions reduction goals in the context of the science-based target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius – the central goal of COP21. In addition to researching 108 company disclosures, the report (entitled Raising the Bar: Advancing Environmental Disclosure in Sustainability Reporting) also inter viewed 59 experts globally to identify promising trends and worr ying shortcomings in sustainability reporting. On the former, the report identifies the emergence of “Collaborative Reporting” with upstream suppliers and downstream stakeholders to transform sustainability reporting from the current one-way, “broadcast” format to a more multidirectional, dynamic, ongoing exchange across the entire value chain. On the latter, the report – which launched at the Reporting 3.0 Conference in Berlin, Germany, a platform dedicated to exploring next-generation practices in corporate sustainability disclosure and integrated reporting – advances a set of recommendations for
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resolving the identified shortcomings. Along the lines of the GHG example above, the report “reproaches” companies for failing to integrate the Sustainability Context Principle, introduced by the Global Reporting Initiative(GRI) in 2002 but still largely unheeded by corporate reporters, more than a dozen years later. That Principle calls for reporting “the performance of the organisation in the context of the limits and demands placed on environmental or social resources at the sectoral, local, regional, or global level.” “To this day in the reporting world, as you well know, Sustainability Context is incipient, uneven, and occasional,” GRI Co-Founder and inaugural CEO Allen White told me. “In the best of worlds, reporting would have evolved to supply Context-based disclosures. But this is not the case.” Accordingly, the UNEP report recommends that companies “apply a context-based approach to sustainability reporting, allocating their fair share impacts on common capital resources within the thresholds of their carr ying capacities.”
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“Corporate sustainability reporting needs to be rapidly elevated from focusing on incremental, isolated improvements to corporate environmental impacts. It should instead ser ve to catalyse business operations along value chains to achieve the kind of transformative change necessar y to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals and objectives by 2030,” said Arab Hoballah, Chief of UNEP’s Sustainable Cities and Lifestyles Branch. Aligning company-level sustainability performance with systems-level thresholds brings not only the benefits of healthy ecosystems, but also tangible financial benefits as well. For example, the UNEP report includes a case study of Nedbank’s Fair Share 2030 strategy and report, which seeks to fulfill the bank’s social purpose by meeting societal needs within biophysical constraints. “We believe this approach aligns with GRI’s Sustainability Context Principle, as spotlighted in UNEP’s Raising the Bar report,” said Brigitte Burnett, Head of Sustainability of Nedbank. “We find that a context-based approach to strategy development greatly enhances our ability to identify innovative funding opportunities and new markets. Through this, we are able to align the interests of our business with our clients and society at large, thereby helping to create a thriving future for all.”
COLLABORATIVE REPORTING The report applies the term “Collaborative Reporting” to describe several emerging practices, such as partnering with upstream suppliers to report on shared impacts and responsibilities, and engaging directly with stakeholders downstream to identify creative solutions to problems that impact them. Looking downstream, the report identifies the rise of online platforms such as Convetit and 2degrees where companies are engaging directly with stakeholders, for example to identify material environmental issues that need to be reported, and to jointly brainstorm solutions to thorny problems. The report identifies four key stakeholder constituencies with the most influence on the quality of sustainability reporting: • Long-term investors; • Stock exchanges; • Governments; and • Companies, through business-to-business relations. “Investors rely on robust, accurate, contextualised and comparable information on company sustainability performance,” said Ole Buhl, Head - Environment, Social
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& Governance at Arbejdsmarkedets Tillægspension (ATP), the Danish pension provider. “The UNEP Raising the Bar report demonstrates the distance still needed to travel before sustainability reporting fits the bill on all these fronts; investors have a wide diversity of disclosure needs to inform their decisions, that are currently met only sporadically, so we are eager for reporting that more consistently and comprehensively meets investor and stakeholder needs.” Interestingly, inter views with experts prompted UNEP to leave civil society off the list of influential stakeholders, as NGOs have a general stance of skepticism toward corporate sustainability reporting and so often do not use sustainability reports. “It is in the best interests of companies to ensure these reports meet high standards of consistent quality that cover material issues core to the business and its stakeholders,” said Gine Zwart of Oxfam Novib, which analyses company sustainability reporting as the basis for its Behind the Brands campaign targeting the food business. “For organisations like Oxfam, this is also an essential requirement to come to collaboration between companies and civil society organisation to reach the
FARMING FOR THE FUTURE MEANS STARTING AT THE BOTTOM. Sustainable farming starts with healthy soil. Healthy soil retains water better, so needs less irrigation, which means less water is wasted. It also needs fewer pesticides or synthetic fertilisers. Working together with our farmers through our Farming for the Future initiative, we are pioneering an approach to growing food in harmony with nature, so that South Africa’s farms will be able to provide food for future generations. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT, AND FOR CHOOSING TO BE A PARTNER IN OUR JOURNEY TOWARDS SUSTAINABILITY.
sustainable outcomes we all want to see.” In addition to these focal areas, the UNEP report also documents widespread shortcomings and dissimilarities in determining the Materiality of key environmental areas and in report Assurance, and so it urges harmonisation of frameworks and guidance as well as strengthening of practice on both.
PURPOSE TO THE PEOPLE
How brands can turn crowds of consumers into movements of change. ROBERT SCHERMERS - INNATE MOTION
Purpose brands that are authentic in creating a positive contribution to society while focusing on the delivery of great products and services are outgrowing other competitors. A clear purpose drives consumer preference and motivates employees, accelerating business results and positive change. 2) Those that change behaviour: Lifebuoy, Heineken and Budweiser take a positive role in changing behaviour towards a purpose or product-related societal issue.
Unilever’s CEO Paul Polman and the ex-global marketing officer of competitor P&G, Jim Stengel (amongst others), have repeatedly shared how brands with a purpose outperform the rest. So how does one accelerate impact and growth of purpose brands further? Our research on the economically powerful millennials and upcoming Generation Z indicate that the growth of purpose brands will continue, as these generations have a serious affinity toward brands with purpose. However, the opportunity lies in the acceleration through further involvement of these generations in the role that the brand takes: they want to actively contribute to a more inclusive, sustainable society and want to see the relevant results of their actions.
THERE ARE THREE LEVELS TO PURPOSE BRANDS 1) Those that share views: Coca-Cola, Always, Dove and Magnum all drive a positive cultural idea at the core of their brand. They tap into a societal issues as a campaign tool and use their views on the issue to create brand differentiation and following.
3) Those that deliver part of a solution: One of the best examples available in my opinion is TOMS, but other brands such as Chipotle and those connected to organisations such as FairTradeTM and the Marine Stewardship Council have also embedded part of their solution to a societal issue into their business model.
EMPOWERMENT AND MEASURABILITY The examples from Level 1 and 2 above provide opportunities for massive societal impact however measuring such brand impact as well as the subsequent sense of consumer empowerment is difficult. As such, communicating this to the people they ser ve is also tricky — so you may feel inspired by Magnum and its #TrueToYourPleasure campaign and share the brand’s view, but you exist as an anonymous individual in a seemingly motionless crowd.
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Interestingly, the examples mentioned under Level 3 give you clear and measurable points of action. You can actively contribute to part of the solution for the societal issue the brand supports by acting with your wallet. Ever y time you buy a brand in one of these examples, you make a statement whilst contributing to the brand’s cause.
Purpose brands turning into movement brands that inspire and empower consumers to join their cause EXPONENTIAL GROWTH OF “GOODSUMPTION” Because of the measurability of results and the sense of empowerment, I see the exponential growth of purposedriven brands in the third categor y.
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We’ve noticed the growth of energy labels over the years and soon we’ll see the labelling of societal impact gain just as much relevance. Labelling will help consumers to take conscious action. Business models where positive societal impact are directly linked to positive business results (so the more I buy, the more I directly impact) will provide consumers with a feeling of empowerment and contribution.
FROM VOTING WITH YOUR WALLET TO CO-CREATING Technology will soon take consumer empowerment even further. I have recently had several meetings with Amar Sharany, the inspiring founder of in/PACT. The software and programmes his team have developed allow consumers and employees of businesses to participate in the allocation of “Goodcoins,” the monetar y expression in/PACT uses for budgets available to brands to drive purpose. With this, consumers and employees do not only act through their wallet, they co-create and co-decide with the brand and get information about their individual contribution for the causes and ideologies they support.
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CREATING MOVEMENT BRANDS
e) They empower consumers and employees to participate and actively contribute to the purpose the brand supports. They make them part of the solution to injustice, social exclusion, ecological and environmental issues etc. and actively create communities.
I see purpose brands turning into movement brands that inspire and empower consumers to join their cause, accelerating their positive impact on society and their growth potential, when: a) They touch a primar y individual emotion broadly recognised in society. These emotions are based on feelings of fear (for social exclusion, rejection, loss of loved ones, health, environment), resentment or injustice.
f) They create visibility of results and impact created by the brand and the people it ser ves. They will in the near future use technology to create customised connections about the individual consumer contribution, inspiring consumers and increasing the sense of impact and empowerment.
b) Their purpose — the change the brand envisions and acts upon — addresses this primar y emotion and is relevant for their business. The closer the link between target audience, purpose and business, the easier it will be to create traction.
Taking the above to heart, brands can turn crowds into movements that are united in their common purpose and actions. Business can become an even more impactful contributor to positive change.
c) They take a stand by staging and dramatising the societal issues they want to address in their campaigns. d) They contribute to the solution of a societal issue, using their business model as a lever for change, sharing a view and/or changing behaviours.
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SOWING THE SEEDS OF CHANGE
Communicating to build an authentic social movement takes more than just a few words. LIAM BRICKHILL – GREENPOP
There’s a proverb, nominally Greek but more likely apocryphal. It goes: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.’ Sounds nice, right? But how do you inspire people to actually get out and plant that tree? When it comes to changing people’s behaviour and effecting positive action, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. It’s not what you’re telling people, necessarily, that matters but how you choose to put that message across. At Greenpop, we could talk about the need for urgent change because of massive, global deforestation, the looming spectre of ecological catastrophe and the menace of predator y global corporate capital that places profits above people and the planet. But if we put it like that, we’d expect nihilism, not action. And that’s the opposite of what we’re tr ying to achieve.
Greenpop aims to inspire people through positive and fun stories about the natural world, our projects, our beneficiaries, our partners, our supporters, and other organisations who are contributing towards the global environmental movement. We also want to activate people to become passionate ambassadors who attend events, donate, fundraise, and influence others to do the same. Finally, we hope to allow people to experience their impact by directly connecting our supporters with the real world results of their labour, fundraising or donations. These three factors create a positive feedback loop that runs through all of our communications, with each element leading into and strengthening the next.
We’re not here to hide the extent of the world’s environmental problems, but extinction language will get us nowhere. And saviour language inspires scorn, not action. So we’ve got to be careful about how we talk to our audience and how we brand ourselves. The abiding feeling should be inspiration and connection. Amid all of our collective problems, there’s still good in people – enough good to change the world. But how?
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The abiding feeling should be inspiration and connection
Courtesy GreenPop
THERE IS SOMETHING DEEPLY HUMAN AND ENGAGING IN PL ANTING A TREE.
That’s our communications strategy in a nutshell. Or, perhaps more aptly, that’s the seed of our strategy. We firmly believe that from that seed shall great trees grow. Lots of them.
strategies come together. It’s a metaphor for ever ything that we do. And that leads us to the final element of our strategy: authenticity. It’s hard to overstate just how important this is for brands and social movements in the current environment. The rise and integration of social media into human life has made people sav v y to many of the techniques used by brands and organisations to gain traction online. It’s not enough to hit the right branding for your cause: you’ve also got to live it yourself to really motivate and mobilise people.
Extinction language will get us nowhere Beyond our communications strategy, the fundamental act of our work at Greenpop is (surprise!) the planting of trees. That act is so simple, and possibly deceptively so when you consider the broader implications of what you’re doing. You dig a square hole slightly deeper than the seedling or young tree that you’re planting, put it in the hole and cover it with a mixture of soil, compost and mulch. On goes the water, and you’re done. Or, not quite, because the end result of that is something that exceeds even the span of a human lifetime. People you will never meet will benefit from it. That tree connects you to the ground upon which all life depends, and will probably outlive you. There’s something deeply human and engaging in that act, and tree-planting is the place where all of Greenpop’s
Courtesy GreenPop
AMID ALL OF OUR COLLECTIVE PROBLEMS, THERE IS STILL GOOD IN PEOPLE.
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GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT
To fast track positive change we need to remember what it means to be human. ROBERT ZIPPLIES - COMMON CAUSE FOUNDATION
To build organisations and societies that are more collaborative and engaged in tackling society’s problems, we must strengthen deeper (intrinsic) values. Globally, we are entering a vibrant period of innovation and change. A growing number of individuals and organisations no longer want to perpetuate the status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the majority and the planet. They are creating an upwelling of positive action, which is best reflected in the rapid growth of NGOs and civil society initiatives (this phenomenon has been tracked by Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest). The growth in jobapplicants seeking to work for organisations that pursue a deeper purpose is also on the rise. But the question is how do we accelerate this shift? How do we mobilise organisational and individual mindsets and action for the common good and stimulate deeper prosocial and pro-environmental engagement to tackle our societal problems? One answer is working with human values and the Common Cause Foundation is doing important work in this area by collating research to allow us to better understand how values shape our attitudes and behaviours. The research indicates that values are not hard-coded, and can be shifted. In fact ever ything we say and do 88
influences those around us. At an organisational level this becomes more multi-faceted. Think of advertising, public relations, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, customer relationship management, management structure, performance incentives, hiring (the list goes on), and what values these practices reinforce or activate in employees, customers and others. For example, if employees are encouraged to purely focus on wealth creation, at the exclusion of other social priorities, they become more materialistic and status driven, and their levels of creativity, volunteering and collaboration reduce. Fifty eight core values have been identified ( Basic Human Values: An Over view ; Shalom H. Schwartz) – but two particular values groups are of interest for building a better future: intrinsic and extrinsic values. Intrinsic values, which are also referred to as compassionate or self-transcendence values, tend to be inherently rewarding to pursue. Examples include social justice, wisdom, responsibility, helpfulness, curiosity, creativity and self-respect.
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INTRINSIC AND EXTRINSIC VALUES - USING A DUAL STRATEGY A tension exists between intrinsic and extrinsic values.Strengthening intrinsic values and weakening extrinsic values results in more pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. (Reference: Common Cause Foundation)
INTRINSIC Values that are inherently rewarding to pursure
EXAMPLES Affiliation to friends and family Connection with nature Concern for others Self acceptance Social justice Creativity
EXTRINSIC
STREGTHEN INTRINSIC VALUES
Values that are centred on external approval or rewards
WEAKEN EXTRINSIC VALUES
EXAMPLES Wealth Material success Concern about image Social status Prestige Social power Authority
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Extrinsic values, which are also referred to as self-centred or self-enhancement values, tend to be centred on external approval or rewards. Examples include wealth, public image, social power, social recognition, ambition, success and influence. An interesting dynamic exists between intrinsic and extrinsic values: they tend to oppose each other. So if you strengthen or activate one value group, it weakens the other.
SOCIAL Lower manipulative behaviour, lower racial and ethnic prejudice, higher levels of co-operation (vs competition)
ENVIRONMENTAL Protecting the environment and having a world of beauty, recycling, re-using, conser ving energy, cycling, and taking part in environmentally-motivated political action.
PERSONAL WELL-BEING
Regretfully we live in a society that all-too-often prioritises extrinsic values. For example, most adverts and many organisational cultures reinforce our insecurities and perceived lack of success, status, social power, recognition and attractiveness, thus perpetuating extrinsic, self-centred values. The result is a constant undermining of our intrinsic values that encourage deeperlevel contribution to society.
ABUNDANT RESEARCH INDICATES THAT STRENGTHENING INTRINSIC VALUES RESULTS IN BENEFITS SUCH AS:
and higher empathy levels.
Higher life satisfaction and levels of self-actualisation and vitality, lower levels of depression and anxiety, lower levels of personality disorders and lower levels of smoking and alcohol use. As individuals and organisations we have a choice about the values we encourage and strengthen in society. And given the above benefits, there seems to be no good reason not to champion intrinsic values, even for hardnosed, profit-driven companies. It results in happier, more productive and collaborative driven individuals and organisations. Working with values is important, and its objective is not to eradicate extrinsic values, but to shift the balance towards the intrinsic. Humans are impressionable creatures and the more we prioritise intrinsic values, the more engaged we become in creating positive change at all levels.
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FINDING THE NORTH STAR
Finding the true purpose of your brand will guide it towards long term growth. KIM HAWKE - WITHIN PEOPLE
Whether you are a business that has been around for several years and is struggling to grow or a multinational that has realised business as usual is no longer possible; finding purpose will help you navigate to a brighter value. There is much attention paid to purpose these days, thanks largely to Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. But what does ‘purpose’ mean? Purpose is a belief, the reason you exist. It’s how you connect with your audience. It’s who you already are. It builds meaning, focus and trust. It drives your vision of commercial success and shapes cultures for growth. In the South African context, people often connect purpose to social responsibility and it’s ver y rarely seen as what really drives core business. Ever y business has a purpose - a reason to exist beyond simply making a profit. It’s the reason the business was started and sets out to solve a problem or satisfy a need that existed in the market.
to working not necessarily by the bigger salar y. In South Africa the narrative on attracting and keeping the right people is steeped in compliance and risk management. But research shows people are searching for meaning and purpose in their work. Being clear and genuine about your purpose attracts like-minded people who share your beliefs and goals and feel as if they ‘belong’. And once someone finds this, they will not want to leave. Businesses who live their purpose know that it provides a lens for strategic decisions, which is especially important during times of change. It provides focus, clarity and the perspective to make authentic choices. It is an anchor and ser ves as that guiding light to follow.
Profit is an outcome of a business that is run well. Long term profit flows from purpose, from a business that makes strong, authentic connections with customers and offers them a product or ser vice aligned to an inspiring purpose. But the question is how does purpose lead to long term growth? People build companies and for them to succeed they need a diverse and talented workforce that are attracted 90
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Every business has a purpose beyond simply making a profit
Courtesy Within People
ONCE YOU'VE DISCOVERED YOUR NORTH STAR, YOUR BR AND WILL STAND OUT.
When your purpose underpins and forms the basis of your entire business, it informs ever ything you do. Your customers will see this and begin to trust you and you’ll build long term, genuine, loyal and resilient relationships with them.
business was started. It just might have gotten lost. Your products and ser vices might change over time, but your purpose must remain the same. Defining what is authentic and meaningful for you about sustainability helps inspire passion and energy for one of our biggest challenges.
How do you find your purpose? And how do you know that you have expressed it in the right way? Here are three principles to guide you:
3. IT MUST PASS THE GOLDILOCKS TEST
1. PURPOSE ISN’T A GOAL It is your intention and belief. It has no numbers in it and it is not about being the best or being number one. It drives our goals, so it cannot be a goal in itself. It’s why you do what you do ever y day. Open Africa is a social enterprise whose objective is to revitalise rural communities through tourism. Our work with Open Africa helped them define their purpose as ‘confidence to grow together’. Helping tourism entrepreneurs work together when both tourists and entrepreneurs have confidence in the value of what is special outside of cities is what drives the growth of the rural tourism industr y.
2. PURPOSE IS POWERED BY THE PAST
It should not be not too big (“change the world”) and not too small or detailed that it only describes your product and ser vice. UNESCO has for 70 years has been tackling the challenge of sustainable development, and we guided them through a multi-stakeholder process to define their purpose as ‘inspiring a positive future by connecting people and nature today’. By finding your North Star, you not only create values that will guide your culture but also aid you in understanding your people, goals and market. Once you have discovered your purpose you will be able to offer a unique offering and brand that stands out in today’s cluttered markets. You can find a full version of our guide to finding purpose here: w w w.withinpeople.com/work/2015/guide-to-finding-purpose
It can be found in the original authentic intention of why the
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BREAKING STEREOTYPES, MISCONCEPTIONS AND LAP RECORDS Meet the vegan hippie chick with a racecar who’s fighting for a better world. LEILANI MUNTER - CARBON FREE GIRL
Leilani Munter first broke the mould as a biology graduate turned pioneering female racecar driver. Now she’s an activist using her racecar as a 200mph billboard to show us that a cleaner and kinder world is worth fighting for. If you have a mission you should shout it from the rooftops. Ten years ago, I decided to do just that – only my rooftop was the hood of a race car. The mission I was on was an environmental one, and much of the racing world was not pleased. Keep in mind that climate change was not as widely understood in 2006 and most of the world was being introduced to it for the first time with Al Gore’s documentar y film An Inconvenient Truth . I was already the odd one out at the race track as one of a handful of women in a sport dominated by men. I was also one of the few drivers with a college education. I hold a degree in Biology specialising in Ecology, Behaviour and Evolution from the University of California in San Diego. I moved from the land of sun and surf to North Carolina racing countr y and the land of asphalt tinged with the smell of burning gasoline. Being vegan in the land of barbeque amplified my already misfit status to new levels. And then I made the commitment to adopt an acre of rainforest for ever y race I ran and started talking about climate change. Boy did that get tongues wagging. It’s safe to say I had given up on fitting in by then.
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I had made one of the most important decisions in my life. I decided to talk about what I believed in. Even if it landed me on the sidelines at the race track. Through racing, I had an audience and I knew I would be a fool to waste that opportunity.
You are either an activist or an inactivist My decision was easy because inside I felt a greater kinship with environmentalists and activists than I did with the racing world. Racing had made a transition inside me, becoming something that I did in order to get my causes in front of a large demographic of people, rather than for the love of speed. There was still the element of wanting to prove that women can hold their own in a male-dominated sport, but the sport itself began to feel quite trivial to me. The causes were more important to me than racing. If I
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Courtesy Leilani Munter
LEIL ANI MUNTER - R ACING FOR A GREATER CAUSE.
wasn’t racing for a cause greater than myself, something that nudges us closer towards the world becoming a better place – then it felt empty. The race itself no longer meant anything to me. The thrill of going into a corner at 200 mph is still with me, because it’s incredibly fun – but racing had become a secondar y pleasure to the deeper one I found in tr ying to further a cause I believed in.
You are either an activist or an inactivist - Those are the words of director Louie Psihoyos in his Academy Award winning film The Cove . And once activism is in your blood, it is in you forever – there is no going back to who you were before. Once you see, you cannot un-see the horrors of this world and you are compelled to put a stop to them. Its gets me out of bed ever y morning – I have something to fight for.
For the last decade my race cars have promoted causes I believe in – renewable energy organisations, solar power, wind power, energy efficiency, and two wonderful documentaries: The Cove and Blackfish . My race car has become a 200mph billboard to advertise not products, but instead shifts in our behaviour for the future of our planet and our species. In 2014 I started driving to all my races in my electric car and my race team became the first in histor y to power our pit box using 100% solar power. It is the only way I can forgive myself for participating in this sport at all.
Being an activist fighting for something bigger than myself has given a purpose to my life in a way that driving a racecar never could.
If you have a mission you should shout it from the rooftops A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
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BE RUTHLESSLY SIMPLE OR FAIL
Successful sustainability messaging means cutting out the jargon. THOMAS KOLSTER – GOODVERTISING
It’s sad to say, but brands truly struggle to make their sustainability story engaging and actionable. Sustainability and ‘green’ have turned into those overused marketing buzz words that are starting to lose meaning. Like when a teenager adds ‘cool’ to every second word they say. Is it really green or just green washed? Transparency is not simplicity. Today companies have to be accountable for their impact on the planet and on people, and the scope of this accountability is increasing as science improves our understanding of our world. Consumers become enlightened, empowered and demand choices, while governments are struggling to provide clear guidance. The result is that consumers, and the brands who have the potential to guide them, are drowning in a sea of information and choices. In the pursuit of transparency many brands have forgotten what communication is about: Making a message engaging and actionable.
Einstein once said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Too often sceptics complain about communication making environmental and social issues banal, but with the sheer amount of advertising messages out there, you have to be simple. And sustainability is anything but simple.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough – Albert Einstein
The journey towards peeling away those redundant layers of communication begins with building relevance and an emotive response by asking questions like, “What’s in it for me?” and “What rocks my world?” Messages must be as simple as a road sign. Just think of how simple those signs are: stop, hospital, no entr y, etc. They only communicate the most important message. Once you do this, you empower your customers to make the right choice.
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I often pinpoint how Marketing is from Mars and Sustainability is from Venus and how the balancing act between them turns into a clash of worlds: simplicity versus complexity, passion versus intellect, the activist versus the accountant, Richard Branson versus Milton
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Courtesy Goodvertising
Friedman, ideals versus rationale, heart versus brain, etc. On Planet Sustainability, it might seem like the right thing to publish the entire lifecycle of a product and the full range of its consequences at ever y stage, but for somebody in the supermarket aisle, it’s just too much to digest at the time. In the search for a simple and engaging messages, marketing risks reduce the complex into what’s simply wrong. So a bottle with 10% less plastic than the next brand becomes “a green choice”. Calling out a green washer isn’t just the responsibility of the consumer but of the industr y as well because the repercussions hurt your messaging (and brand). Haagen-Dazs got this balance right, when they created a range of “natural ice creams” to respond to people’s dislike of processed foods with too many ingredients. The range was called “5”, since it in contained only what is needed to make ice cream: skim milk, cream, sugar, egg yolks and the flavour, for example real strawberries. Communicating endeavours for better social and environmental endeavours pays if it’s simple. And simplicity pays. Siegel+Gale’s 2011 Global Brand Simplicity Index found that consumers are willing to pay 5–6% more for a simpler brand experience or interaction. Simplicity is key if you want consumers responding to your initiatives.
It is the easiest and most effective way of making sure that your messages are actionable and that you close the gap between intent and behaviour. Recent information in the field of brain science has proven that passion and emotion, rather than facts, have a greater chance of triggering a sale. Emotional messages connect with a part of the limbic brain called the amygdala, which governs feelings such as trust, loyalty, fear, desire and decision-making, but not language. This is why we have an easier time explaining our decision-making process in words, whereas when confronted with an emotional message, the answer is usually “it just feels right”. Simplicity creates prosperous brands. Yet it’s one of the hardest disciplines to crack, but if done right it can be a powerful tool for change and turn communication into action. The world is complicated enough as it is and if you can make it simple for people to act or engage with your brand, or even show them the way to a more simple and responsible life, you will have loyal followers and a prosperous brand.
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A MORE PROMISING PATH FOR GIRLS
P&G’s Always Keeping Girls in School Programme has been living up to its name and changing the lives of girls across Africa. KHULULIWE MABASO - PROCTER & GAMBLE (P&G)
In 2003, a young girl, Kosigir, who lived in a village in Kenya, was forced into marrying a much older man. She was a ‘drought bride’, sold to her future husband by desperate parents, who needed the money to look after their younger children. Falling pregnant almost immediately, Kosigir became a mother to Jenphor when she was just 13 years old. She never went back to school. Now, 13 years later, Kosigir is concerned that her daughter, who is now the same age as she was when she became a parent, will follow in her footsteps. “Jenphor isn’t disciplined. She plays with boys all the time and she’s not
report that found that menstruation may seriously affect girls’ attendance, attention and achievement in school in both rural and urban areas.
working well in class. I want a better future for her but she does not take her education seriously. I also worr y that my husband will want her to marr y soon.”
Because the girls can’t afford adequate sanitar y protection and don’t always understand the changes their bodies are going through, they can miss up to two weeks of learning for ever y school term. During the course of their five-year high school career, girls from developing countries can lose up to 30 weeks of school out of a total of 180, leading them to fail or drop out altogether.
The case of Kosigir and Jenphor is not unique. In the developing world, 38% of girls marr y before they are 18. Annually, 14 million girls become parents between the ages of 15 and 19. Their new roles as wives and mothers usually require them to stay at home to do household chores for their husband’s family and look after their children. Boys in Africa and South Asia remain 1.55 times more likely to complete secondar y education than girls. However, it is not only tradition, marriage and children that limit the education of these girls. Menstruation has also been identified as a primar y cause of school absenteeism in girls. Research has shown that girls in the developing world can be absent from school for four days a month due to their periods. This is supported by a 2005 World Bank 96
Once they drop out of school, girls are far less likely to find employment, which means they have little choice but to marr y. In addition, their low self-esteem makes them more susceptible to gender violence, sexual abuse, and unsafe sexual practices. To address this, P&G initiated the Always Keeping Girls in School Programme in 2006, in order to regularly distribute sanitar y towels to girls from underprivileged areas. Aware that the mere donation of feminine hygiene products is not going to resolve this problem, P&G ensures that a
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
SPONSOR Courtesy Procter &Gamble
ONCE THEY DROP OUT OF SCHOOL, GIRLS ARE FAR LESS LIKELY TO TO FIND EMPLOYMENT THAN THOSE STAY IN EDUCATION.
large part of the programme focuses on empowering these young girls by educating them about health issues, particularly puberty hygiene, and how to take care of themselves.
with puberty can erode their confidence. We believe that providing girls with support, accurate knowledge and confidence empowers them to make better decisions, now and for their future, and this is true for ever y girl around the world who encounters the Always brand in this critical time.
In the developing world, 38% of girls marry before they are 18
Last year, in Kenya and Tanzania alone, the Always Keeping Girls in School Programme reached over 6,000 individuals and indirectly impacted 30,000 girls and women. Kosigir has seen the benefits of the programme. She noticed a change in her daughter soon after the Always Keeping Girls in School Programme started at Jenphor’s school. "I obser ved a new discipline in her. If I sent her to the store, she came back in haste. When school is done, she now comes straight home. Previously she would be late. She hadn’t found someone who could teach her well."
The programme also teaches the girls how to budget and save. In this way, they are less vulnerable, and have a better chance of freeing themselves from the cycle of poverty they were born into. To ensure maximum impact, P&G also engages their parents in regular discussions around the beliefs and practices, such as child marriage and early pregnancy, which limit their daughters’ educational opportunities and endanger their health.
Jenphor echoes her mother’s sentiments, “I am now concentrating in class and getting good marks. I am even seeing how my future will be. It is good.”
*World Bank’s 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development.
Building the self-esteem of young girls is also a key priority of this programme, as the uncertainty that comes A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
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UBUNTU BRAND BUILDING
Branding based upon truth, that has a positive impact on our lives and the environment, is what the world needs now. MARK AINK - NATIVE CIRCLES
I was born in 1966 in a small town in The Netherlands and had a truly happy and carefree childhood in a loving environment. I was lucky. I grew up surrounded by nature, always played outside and lived amongst our chaotic menagerie of dogs, cats, sheep, ponies, pigs, rabbits, chickens and one cow. When I couldn’t sleep at night I would crawl in the dog basket next to our two German Shepherds, dreaming I was a small Indian boy being raised by wolves. When I was eight years old I had to prepare a speech for my class and my first subject was (not surprisingly) “Indians of North-America”. The second, “The Amazon: Lungs of the earth”.
After twenty years of working with great brands like Apple, Audi, Nike, Domino’s Pizza, Dockers and Heineken, we started working for one of the smallest brands (Ecover) and I fell in love with their passionate drive to reduce environmental impact of their own cleaning products.
I have just turned 50. In the space of 42 years we’ve lost almost 20% of the Amazon rain forest, approximately half of the world’s tropical forests and more then 50% of our species worldwide.
Disconnection is the source of most of the challenges we face right now
The Amazon Indian tribes are being driven off or killed for the sake of drilling oil and we face enormous global economic, ecological and social challenges. You have probably seen (and are tired of) all the doom and gloom. I know I am which is why I would rather tr y and do something to help. Going back to my childhood, you probably expected me to end up being a conser vationist or philosopher. I didn’t – I became instead an advertising man.
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They took me along to a meeting of the Social Venture Network, where I met the gardener of the estate, an elder Indian chief who opened my eyes and heart during a lengthy and engaging conversation about his perspective on life, nature and the interconnnectivity of the whole.
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Courtesy Native Circles
WE HAVE LOST THE UNDERSTANDING THAT WE ARE ALL CONNECTED.
This conversation led me to step away from my own company in the end and steer the talent I was given towards helping brands that aim for a positive side-effect of their commercial operation.
status and animals are industrial resources. The more disconnected we are, the more we cr y for connection, for true relationships, for integrity and meaning. We want to relate to nature, to each other, to the products we buy and the companies we work for and buy from.
Great branding is not about crafting an image, it’s about sharing the company’s soul
Companies and brands play a crucial role in reconnecting things because they have huge impact. We need to start applying all of our creative abilities, within our respective roles, in order to grow and accelerate towards a vital economy that lives in harmony with a healthy planet and all its inhabitants. We should do shit that matters. Great branding is not about crafting an image, it’s about sharing the company’s soul. I didn’t learn that wise lesson from a guru, I learned it from Phil Knight, the founder of Nike.
I’m convinced that disconnection is the source of most of the challenges we face right now. Over the past centur y we have lost the understanding that we are all connected in this web of life. We think of ourselves far too frequently as individuals, separated from one another and from nature. The more ‘developed’ we have become, the more we have alienated ourselves from our connections by inventing models, systems and spreadsheets. The earth has become a mine; people are degraded to target groups or employee
We should connect the companies we work for to their souls and then start sharing that soul, with jaw-dropping, life-changing, attractive kick-ass ideas. I am, because of you.
w w w.native-circles.com w w w.common.is
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STAY PLUGGED IN TO TOPICAL ISSUES BY ATTENDING MAIL & GUARDIAN EVENTS. To register your interest email your contact information to events@mg.co.za
WHAT GOES AROUND...
How can we improve our economy and standard of living while lessening the impact on our natural world? ALEX LEMILLE - WIZEIMPACT
For centuries the world has followed the take-make-waste pattern of the linear economic model. But in today’s world of rapid consumption and shorter usage periods of consumables, should we not adopt the innovative, smarter and more forward-thinking Circular Economic Model? The Circular Economy has gained strong momentum in different parts of the world since it resonates with businesses and countries. Today’s world is constantly looking at growing national domestic products and corporate revenues at all costs. The linear economic model is one of taking resources from the ground, transforming them into commercial products, consuming them and then disposing of them. But with the usage period becoming shorter, due to forced obsolescence, we generate tons of waste and millions of hours of research and development which we then just throw into the landfills. The same landfills which create countless environmental and societal challenges. Forced obsolescence has become so per vasive that we have now reached a point where up to 80% of our products becomes waste within the first six months from point of purchase*. Besides the fact that our growing economies have accelerated climate change patterns, we have another problem - strongly linked to South Africa - the end of cheap resources is in sight and in a world with seven billion people, consumption will only increase exponentially.
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Too often we are reminded that we dig for the precious resources our global economy requires and then sell these resources to overseas conglomerates who then transform them into valuable products. The ver y same high-end products, made partly with local materials, which we then buy ‘back’ at a hefty price. It makes no sense for man on the street, nor from a national and economic point of view. It is called globalisation, where ever y countr y has a role to play in the world supply chain and, with South Africa at its early extraction phase, now is the time to question this model. The mineral resources of South Africa are not only highly valued but its value can easily last for generations to come. How? Well, if you look at it as a stock of many resources, a valued stock needs to be maintained and replenished constantly. In a Circular Economy we believe that there are enough materials on Earth. It is just a matter of circulating them for longer in our economies. Soon we will see electronic devices made to last longer, with ser vices as the preferred mean of access to goods. These devices will be made modular, with blocks that can
Change Agent Collective Image Library©
be used, updated, and upgraded according to customers’ wishes. Ver y much like the Phoneblok or Google’s Project Ara, which will result in phones that are customised module by module. Soon they will even be 3D printed. In such an economy, the extractive activity could change dramatically and for the better: soon materials will have to be maintained for durability.
By changing the way we create and consume, we will enjoy a better standard of living The new opportunity for growth lies in the re-use of products that are obtainable exclusively as a ser vice or with momentar y ownership. Imagine the large electronic brands proposing the best audio-visual experience with the promise to offer you the latest technologies at all times thanks to constant upgrades. You would not have to worr y about technological advances since brands would strive to ensure you enjoy the best experience because they would
make their profits in keeping you happy for as long as possible. Payment to access the equipment would be made on a monthly basis or on a pay-as-you-use system. Take your washing machine for instance. You would only pay when you used it. Your behaviour would change: there will always a full load. This means your electricity bill will decrease since you have reduced your number of washes and your water bill will decrease. Not a bad advantage in an electricity and water scarce countr y. By changing the way we create and consume, we will enjoy a better standard of living while ensuring our resources are used intelligently and made to last. We will have stimulated our economy and reduced the strain we have placed on the planet. With all the negatives we see with the Linear Economic Model and the benefits of Circular Economy, it’s clear that there is only one way for ward. * Perella, 2014
CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
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BUILDING A NATION
In the bigger picture CSI contributions may seem a drop in the ocean but it makes a vital difference. KERI-LEIGH PASCHAL - MUTHOBI FOUNDATION’S NATION BUILDER INITIATIVE
Almost every corporate in South Africa has a comprehensive CSI programme. But why is it needed and how can we ensure it’s making a real difference where it matters most? Corporate social investment (CSI) is mainly a self-imposed voluntar y tax that companies take on, encouraged through private sector agreements and state tender incentives by Government. Essentially CSI is but one strand of a strong South African tradition of voluntar y upliftment work in local communities, charities and philanthropy of the sort typically found in “frontier” or emerging societies that have a “can do” spirit.
And, while slow economic growth and high spending commitments mean that the government is looking for ways to raise revenue and keep costs down, the same pressures mean that CSI spending is declining for the first time in almost 20 years. But if CSI spending is so small compared to public spending, and if both may have hit a (temporar y) ceiling, why then is CSI and other forms of good giving so important to the government and why the emphasis on encouraging it?
But when it’s seen in the big pond of taxpayer-funded government spending in social development, then CSI is a small fish indeed. So the current combined national and provincial budget stands at just under R1,3 trillion, against which Trialogue (a consultancy specialising in CSI) estimates that companies spent just over R8 billion on CSI projects last year.
The answers lie mainly in our historical legacies and partly in SA’s “best constitution in the world”. Where some countries include human rights in their constitutions, they almost only ever entrench the fundamental rights to things like free association and speech, and from abuse like torture – in other words, protection against the state.
Almost half of all CSI contributions went to projects linked to education, the development sector that 89% of companies who have CSI programmes include among their beneficiaries. That means about R4bn, compared to a state education budget of R247bn.
Uniquely, SA went further and gave equal weight to the rights “to access” in things like education, healthcare and housing. Our Government doesn’t have to provide them all, but its policies must ensure these things continually improve, according to the Constitutional Court.
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ALMOST HALF OF ALL CSI CONTRIBUTIONS ARE LINKED TO EDUCATION.
That, combined with the Constitution’s demand for equality of opportunity, means the Government is playing catch-up right across the countr y in pulling access to facilities and ser vices to equal levels. Thus, back in education, it has meant combining 15 separate and often ver y different departments and often curricula. It’s expensive and difficult, with legacies remaining stubborn (so the old Bophuthatswana’s relatively good schooling system still comes through in the currently good North West pass rates, while Venda’s disastrous schooling still plays out in today’s Limpopo, etc). Government’s obligation to equality puts our better performing schools and other institutions at risk because it hardly has room to fund them adequately, never mind strengthen these mostly fragile institutions. Here, especially, the private sector’s CSI top-up in finding and bolstering society’s “champions” becomes critical. Corporate largesse can be used flexibly and is often the tipping point between growing success or failure for the countr y’s centres of excellence of all sorts.
yet long overdue. It’s to be a catalyst that helps mobilise businesses to know more and do better in their good giving efforts. The Nation Builder project is about sharing with these partners across SA what those with experience in the CSI sector already know works best and what does not. One practical aspect is in the just-released and globally unique CSI Benchmarking Tool, a confidential, comprehensive self-assessment online platform that lets companies better manage their social investments and is reinforced with detailed advisories on all manner of business-driven community development. It’s free – a gift to SA from a Nation Builder’s team that includes Investec, KPMG, Edcon, Growthpoint Properties, Tsogo Sun, and the Gordon Institute of Business Science. This, and many other unique resources and practical insights, are found at w w w.proudnationbuilder.co.za
This is the idea behind a new campaign called “Nation Builder”, launched and managed by the Stellenbosch and Pretoria-based Muthobi Foundation. The concept is simple, BUILDING RESILIENCE - SUPPLY CHAINS & ENTERPRISE DEVELOPMENT
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THE BIG WHITE BUILDING
A start-up in a slum for sustainable living, business and empowerment. VANESSA CATHERINE - PROCTER & GAMBLE (P&G)
John K. is 24 years old. He is one of the hundreds of thousands of people who live in what is often referred to as the largest slum in Africa: Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya. John doesn’t really know a life beyond the shacks of Kibera and has stayed in the same tiny two-roomed home with his mother, his two sisters and his uncle for as long as he can remember. When his mother, the sole breadwinner in the family, lost her job a few years ago, John was desperate to find work. But, like many other unemployed Kibera residents, he did not know how to write a CV, how to impress prospective employers in a job inter view or even where to look for a job. However in July 2014, something changed in the slum that John called home. The big, white building in Gatwekera, which was the subject of much gossip and speculation, finally opened its doors to the community. At first, many Kibera residents, including John, were unsure about entering the impressive structure, believing that something so new, clean and promising could not possibly be for them. Word travelled fast. The building, known as ‘K.T.C’ – Kibera Town Centre – was rumoured to offer many quality and valuable things that Kibera residents believed were out of their reach: clean water, hygienic toilets, hot showers, a premium laundr y experience with reliable washing machines, and a cyber café with a stable and fast connection, along with multiple training and micro finance 106
CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
options. And all of these ser vices were available at an affordable fee. Intrigued, John finally walked through the centre’s doors to ‘check with his own eyes’. Warmly welcomed by the local born-and-raised-in-Kibera staff, he actually ‘felt good inside’ and discovered many options that could help in defining his path out of poverty. John signed up for two of the centre’s training courses that ver y day. The KTC team is helping John on the difficult journey to stay focused and committed to his own dreams and success: from simple tips from the Ariel Laundr y Room on how to look smart before a job inter view to training in the classroom on how to articulate his passion, ambition and experience to others. John is now employed in a nearby company, able to pay for his further studies and to cover his younger sister’s school fees. His dream of becoming a professional accountant and running his own business now seems just a matter of time. This first-of-its-kind Community Centre was launched in 2014 by the Human Needs Project (HNP), in partnership
SPONSOR Courtesy Procter & Gamble
THE KIBER A TOWN CENTRE IN NAIROBI, KENYA, OFFERS MANY SERVICES RESIDENTS FELT WERE OUT OF THEIR REACH.
with Procter & Gamble (P&G), following an extensive engagement with the community. Before designing and building the centre, HNP met with almost 100 political, government and traditional leaders and created a Community Co-ordinating Committee to consult with local organisations. For two years they trained almost 30 Kiberans to operate the centre. A rotating workforce was educated in modern building techniques to construct the building. The eco-friendly structure would house the seeds of their town’s positive future.
The eco-friendly structure would house the seeds of Kibera’s positive future
The centre has 600 interactions with customers ever y day, and this enables it to tailor its offering to their needs, such as the new water kiosk at a nearby primar y school. Now, the school children and their neighbours have access to quality water without having to carr y heav y jerr y cans over long distances. The Ariel Laundr y Room means that heav y blankets no longer have to be washed by hand and that suits can be pristine for a job inter views. Through this start-up journey that P&G has embarked on together with a remarkable NGO partner, this project demonstrates that it can not only be socially and environmentally self-sustainable, but also financially viable. This pilot is a key defining step in understanding how to unleash the formidable economical force of communities like this one. It shows how best to ser ve the least affluent with delightful solutions, given constrained natural and structural resources, and how to out-innovate scalable solutions, which are both affordable and sustainable.
Since KTC opened, it’s had over 175 000 visitors who, just like John, come in early to shower before work, enjoy a cup of tea and a mandazi and some are even learning how to use the Internet in the IT training centre. CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
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BUILDING A BETTER TOMORROW
Partnerships spur innovation through the Better Living Challenge. LISA PARKES - CAPE CRAFT AND DESIGN INSTITUTE (CCDI)
Urban regeneration means the improvement of the quality of life and investing in the future. We have seen many integrated approaches and disruptive trends aimed at improving the environmental, economic and social health of our communities and cities, but finding relevant, locally contextual and specific interventions is challenging. Many organisations and policy makers are searching for better ways to identify and accelerate this process with novel solutions. They’ve begun tapping into an ecosystem of potential innovators who possess wideranging skills and knowledge. They discover and attract these contributors by launching competitions and offering prizes. The Better Living Challenge (BLC), run by the CCDI, is one such emerging example and demonstrates how a collaboration between the public, private sector, and civil society can stimulate innovation, promote economic development and create jobs. Launched in 2012 as part of the Western Cape Government’s 110% Green initiative (which aimed to create innovations that supported the Western Cape’s goal of becoming Africa’s leading green economic hub), the BLC is a five year project aimed at generating design innovation to contribute to improving the living conditions of low-income households and supporting the commercialisation of viable solutions. An official project (WDC#204) of the Cape Town World Design Capital 2014 (WDC2014) programme, run in 110
partnership with the Western Cape Departments of Economic Affairs and Tourism and Human Settlements it called upon manufacturers, designers, inventors and entrepreneurs to design new solutions that meet the needs of the low-income home improvement market. They included building materials, low-carbon products, water capturing and drainage systems, fire-safety products (particularly for shack dwellings) and interior items for storage and comfort. The BLC was effective in that it prompted diversity in participation, which generated a wider variety and greater number of solutions. Over 130 applicants entered and three winners were awarded a grand prize of half a million rand’s worth of support ser vices to enable them to upscale and take their solutions to market – facilitating the concept-tomarket value chain. Although the BLC was specifically aimed at lower LSM groups, the award-winning innovations are applicable in various communities. The BLC also supported the strategic objectives of the Western Cape Design Strategy
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Courtesy CCDI
MAYOR PATRICIA DE LILLE VISITS THE BLC SHOWCASE IN NOVEMBER 2014.
of embracing design in the public sector and involving citizens - embracing design and design thinking. Competitions, especially those following business planstyle formats, provide an excellent vehicle for identifying a large number of early-stage opportunities, evaluating them and building communities in emerging areas. As such, the BLC is a good example of an innovation challenge model that combines seed capital, early-stage partnerships and other “open innovation” approaches. All three winners have done extremely well in their product to market journey to date: • Structural Home category – USE-IT Compressed Earth Blocks, now branded RambrickTM , uses a 30% blend of builder’s waste rubble and available clay-bearing soils in the manufacture of bricks for building sustainable homes with a low carbon footprint. They currently have a pilot in Stellenbosch and produce bricks for market consumption. • Comfortable Home category – Lumkani, a low-cost fire detector and alert system designed for low-income households, has received SABS certification and have over 5000 units already sold with a pilot project being run in Masiphumelele.
• Connected Home category – Cityspec, an open source mobile inspection tool helps civil society organisations and community workers to monitor and administer basic ser vice deliver y in informal settlements, are well into their cost benefit analysis with a real-time monitoring project in place in Monwabisi Park. “Now in its third year, the focus is on implementing the three support ser vice awards for the winners and building interest through strategic communication in preparation for the launch of the BLC2 in July 2016” says Project Manager, Lisa Parkes. “With the theme of ‘Embracing Informality and Enabling Incrementalism’ we are partnering again with the Provincial Department of Human Settlements, to create a user-centred challenge, one that stimulates design innovations (opportunities, ideas and designs) that support the incremental improvement/ expansion of low-income homes; provide better quality and alternative building materials; increase the comfort and quality of life of residents and enable a more densified urban form” she adds. It is through programmes like the Better Living Challenge that we will see true innovation that improve the environmental, economic and social health of our communities and cities in a local context.
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CO-CREATING CITIES
Incubating the creative economy. SAINT-FRANCIS TOHLANG - INDEPENDENT CONSULTANT
The creative economy is not only one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy, but also a highly transformative one in terms of income-generation, job creation and export earnings. But what is the link between it and our cities? Cities are intrinsically living organisms with a personality, inhabited by people, characterised by movement and a flow of energy. A city in many ways resembles a cell; the ver y basic structure and foundation of all living organisms. Ever y city contains a nucleus (the centre), specific DNA (the identity and spatial narrative of that city), and a network all contained in a structure (the nodes of connection, architecture and parameters of ever y city). When we begin to re-imagine new modalities of our cities and investigate ways in which our cities become sustainable – what should be at the crux of these conversations should be how creativity, particularly creativity as a commodity, can define how we understand our cities. What this calls for is a paradigm shift that is on the peripher y, yet on increasingly on the cusp of that tipping point. A paradigm shift that looks at how we design and conceptualise our cities, the potential for new economies and business models to thrive. This impending paradigm shift presents a future of abundance, principally circular in approach. In recent times, we have begun to scratch the surface of the exciting opportunities the city and particularly creative 112
and cultural inter ventions mean for economic progress. Cultural and artistic inter ventions often times mean applied innovation resulting in new business, attracting talent, tourism, investment and urban development. Through the work of Charles Landr y, we have the frame of reference to conceptualise what ‘future cities’ look like; but more importantly have found tangible ways to show a direct correlation between cities thriving with cultural capital and economic and sustainable growth within that urban centre. We have come to understand this dynamic interplay of urban centres, creativity and cultural institutions to be the proponents of the creative economy. An economic approach believed to be transformative in unlocking the world’s creative resources and investing these into industries to tip the scale of scalable and sustainable growth. Not only does the creative economy focus on the effects of creativity on industr y, but for the first time puts the importance of culture in affirming individuals’ human rights, belonging and identity as positive factors towards development. There has been defining discourse and development of the concept since the early conceptions of the creative economy, which was mainly referenced on the
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Courtesy St Francis Tohlang
THE CIT Y IS AN IMPORTANT INCUBATOR FOR CREATIVE ECONOMY.
work of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’. We have stepped beyond thinking about the creative class but looking at the collusion of the spaces in which the creative class occupy and how those spaces become incubations for innovation across industries.
A city resembles a cell; the basic structure and foundation of all living organisms New global problems have necessitated a need to approach solutions differently. While Circular Economies, Solution-Driven Economies and Social Economy models remain important disruptors to neoliberal economics, the creative economy will prove to be important to create a narrative and approach that endeavours to be inclusive in its approach. Inclusive in how it positions the self and identity as important proponents to economic activity and productivity.
The African continent remains an exciting prospect for the creative economy to find expression. Given that the continent’s urbanisation rate, the highest in the world, is projected to be exponential in the coming years, the cities will become the breeding grounds for disruptive approaches. In fact, we are already seeing pockets of this in effect across the continent. Initiatives such as ‘The Future Cities Africa’ initiative ultimately aspires to drive inclusive growth across urban centres in the continent. As the UN ‘Creative Economy Report: 2013’ report posits: “The creative economy is not only one of the most rapidly growing sectors of the world economy, but also a highly transformative one in terms of income-generation, job creation and export earnings”. The city will become an important incubator for our creative economies and lead to an open-minded culture and spaces that are transformative.
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DESIGNING THE FUTURE
Eight ways to predict and manage the road ahead. DR MORNÉ MOSTERT - THE INSTITUTE FOR FUTURES RESEARCH OF UNIVERSITY OF STELLENBOSCH
The development of anticipatory competence is emerging as a critical strategic capability for leaders in service of influential organisations. As the world becomes ever more complex and as uncertainty distinguishes itself as the only dimension of certain growth, senior leaders are, by default, charged with making decisions that will impact the likely viability of their organisations. For that reason, they must enhance their capacity for foresight, now more than at any other time in the history of our species. The study of the ‘future’ has, in turn, evolved as a close cousin of Systems Thinking, which has strongly informed the study of Sustainability because of the ecological intelligence it offers. But Systems Thinking has also lead to the significant emergence of Design Thinking, which shares its parentage with industrial design sciences such as Engineering and Architecture. For that reason, Futurists may learn a great deal from the humility at the heart of the Design Thinking philosophy. Such humility means that leaders - as designers of the future- may treat the future as a client whose design needs require appreciative understanding. Leaders may therefore evaluate the maturity of their futures design by examining the extent to which they are tendentious or appreciative of the possible realities of a time yet to come. An evolution process may be described that indicates levels of futures design maturity. This process can be split into eight distinct levels:
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LEVEL 1: DESIGN-FREE HISTORY At this rudimentar y level of maturity, there is virtually no design. Leaders depend largely on memor y as the foundation for decision-making, and the recall of such memor y is inevitably selective. They use mainly hindsight as a means of grasping at the future.
LEVEL 2: DESIGN-FREE COMMENTARY This next level remains largely free of design, but emphasises bold descriptions of the current situation. It often leads to status quo bias, in which mind-set leaders assume that the future will resemble the dominant factors currently present.
LEVEL 3: DESIGN-FREE PREDICTION Leaders now move beyond the present and express themselves on what may come, but they do so based mainly on what they hope or wish for. Design practice is light if at all present. They make decisions while their perceptual blind-spots wreak havoc with the scope of their perspectives.
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Change Agent Collective Image LibraryŠ
LEVEL 4: DESIGN DESPITE THE FUTURE This level is characterised by the paradox of care in the decision-making process, without due consideration of possible futures. It is wilful and often blindly confident, based on data that suggest trends of the past and present. Possible futures, if considered, are deemed as inevitable consequences of current trends.
possible future scenarios. It extends to the evaluation of probable and preferable futures and attempts to reverse engineer the most desirable options. By back-casting from the vantage points of alternative future scenarios, it examines the present from a futures perspective, thus enhancing the scope of possibility for current decision-making.
LEVEL 8: DESIGN THE FUTURE
LEVEL 5: DESIGN FOR THE FUTURE Decision-making at this level has an in-built dualism in its perspective. It views the future firstly as singular, and secondly as distinct from current events. In this mind-set, the future is treated as a separate construct for which the leader identifies steps on a typically linear path towards success.
LEVEL 6: DESIGN WITH THE FUTURE Cognitive processing at this rather high level of maturity accepts a degree of inevitability in certain aspects of the future, but it embraces the wisdom that an array of possible future states may bring. It allows for possible futures to inform the design of current plans, although it tends to favour the likely dominance of current structures.
Leaders who make long-range decisions at this level view alternative futures in a menu of possibility. This level assumes active agency for the leader in the shaping of the future. It is characterised by humble participative design. Leaders demonstrate anticipator y competence through deliberate and courageous normative expression. They engage beneficiaries of possible futures in a dynamic co-creation of meaningful alternative futures. The design of the future requires leaders with advanced anticipator y cognitive competence. It demands a rare combination of courage and humility, where leaders embrace strategic foresight in order to co-locate themselves with the beneficiaries of a spectrum of possible futures.
LEVEL 7: DESIGN BY THE FUTURE This level shows deep respect for alternative futures to the extent that it experiments with conceptual immersion in INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION - MACRO TRENDS & DRIVERS
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LIFE, A MANIFESTO BY MBALI VILAKAZI
This is emergence. A pulse so strong As in the morning hour when the knife Inexorable slits the curtain sleep along. Shake off your webbing dreams and embrace the strife. This is the time for truth. There is a time for impossible and inconvenient For arrogant and indignant For lack of will This is not that time. This is not the time to be pragmatic And fearful. Not the time for excuses, conservative think tanks and science This is not mutually exclusive. Not Racism. Not sexism This is not the unbalanced scales of injustice This is not hegemony and hierarchy The back story At the end of the sky, Look at our brokenness. We Once whole, Formed from Earth, Wind, Fire and Water Our breath Blown from the first horn. We have strayed from the Sacred Way. “And change only comes when the conversation is happening in all forms at all times. Not just one tactic is going to do it. It’s got to be a convergence.” - Lupita Ny’ongo
This is for those who dreamed of us. And for those of whom we dream. The tentacles of memory reaching back to the journey: Empires and monuments The great –
Migrations, religions and the voyages The slave ship leaving the port. This is not that time. This is the time to stop being so afraid. This is possibility. This is not the time for taking. And taking and taking and taking. This is not profit over life. This is enough. And this is more. This is not the end This is the beginning This is a new story. From the sun-place Swiftly send the wind; Tell us how we Heal each other And live the songs The great mother sings. This is Connectedness: Compassion / Healing / Love and Imagination. This is Katrina, Equador, South Africa and Japan. This is you. This is me. This is not impunity. This moment is transcendence. This is disruption. This is the refugee / the student / the feminist / the trade unionist / the entrepreneur / the pope / and civil rights This is before. This is what happens next. This is everyone. This is now. Courtesy Mbali Vilakazi
EMULATING NATURE’S GENIUS
With nature as our mentor we can create systems that are regenerative, resilient and circular. CLAIRE JANISCH – IMAGINATURE
Inherent within nature are the recipes and strategies we need to recreate our future. All we need to do is observe the species active today and work out how to emulate them. Take for example the life cycle of a solar panel compared to that of a leaf (nature’s solar panel).
coupled with evapotransporation; a process that drives the water cycle and contributes to rainfall.
The average solar panel takes up to six years to reproduce the energy it took to make. In most solar panel production, fossil fuels are used and they in turn emit an extremely potent greenhouse gas - sulfur hexafluoride- which is used to clean the reactors used in silicon production. One ton of sulfur hexafluoride has a greenhouse effect equivalent to 25,000 tons of CO2. Added to this are the other toxic chemicals involved in solar panel manufacture like silane and trichlorosilane; the combination of which produces silicon tetrachloride, an extremely toxic substance. Silica is refined at high temperatures and higher purities are achieved through a chemical process that exposes metallurgical grade silicon to hydrochloric acid and copper. When the life of the solar panel is over, it may end up in landfill where toxic leaching can be a problem. Comparing the above process to that of a leaf that takes in carbon dioxide to make its polymers; its by-product is oxygen. This process is called photosynthesis and is 118
The average solar panel takes up to six years to reproduce the energy it took to make Interspersed in the leaf’s polymer are chlorophyll molecules that capture the photons of the sun and convert them into complex sugars and fuel. The chemistr y is so life-friendly the leaf can be eaten, and even when toxic to some animals the toxicity doesn’t last because the compounds break down into benign constituents. When the leaf’s life is over it falls to the ground to turn into soil. The life-cycle of the leaf contributes to building soil, cleaning
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Change Agent Collective Image Library©
IN NATURE WE CAN FIND THE STR ATEGIES TO RECREATE OUR FUTURES.
air and driving the water cycle. This is a truly regenerative life-cycle design. What’s more, the leaf has built-in strategies for resilience. The veins of the leaf provide a blueprint for optimised and resilient distribution. If any part of the leaf is consumed, the distribution patterns in the vein enable the nutrients and fluids to reach the remaining parts of the leaf. There is not just one chlorophyll molecule, but thousands of them; not just one leaf on the plant, but thousands of them. The leaves are positioned at a variety of optimised angles and the plant doesn’t have just one function, but a multitude.
There truly is no greater model, measure and mentor, than nature itself
a rainforest (the lungs of our planet) and note the individual parts contribute to a system that is greater than the sum of its parts. Inherent in this example of the leaf are deep principles found in all organisms and ecosystems in nature. As we strive towards regenerative and resilient circular economies, there truly is no greater model, measure and mentor, than nature itself. Biomimicr y is the practise of learning from and emulating this genius. It’s about abstracting relevant principles from nature for application in our designs. The deep principles for thriving resilience, based on 3,8billion years of experience, have been abstracted into Biomimicr y Life’s Principles. These principles can be used by designers, engineers, businesses and biologists to evaluate existing products, processes and systems. They guide new designs and businesses towards truly regenerative and resilient outcomes.
When we obser ve the interconnected system of plants, animals, fungus, algae, bacteria, etc. we obser ve INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION - MACRO TRENDS & DRIVERS
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A FOUR-GRAM SACHET
The key to improving the quality of life of millions of people lies in something you can carry in your pocket. ALLISON TUMMON-KAMPHUIS - PROCTER & GAMBLE (P&G)
It takes just 30 minutes – using only a bucket, a spoon, a cloth and a four-gram P&G Purifier of Water sachet – to purify 10 litres of dirty, contaminated water. Ten litres of clean water that could be used to quench the thirst of a young girl, to cleanse the hands of her hardworking father and to wash the food that her mother is preparing for their evening meal. Rose M lives in a semi-urban area in Kisumu County in Western Kenya with her husband and two teenage children. She and her husband, Sam, are HIV-positive, so they are particularly susceptible to waterborne diseases. Her entire family would often get sick from drinking the polluted water from a nearby river, contaminated by the local wildlife. “The water was ver y dirty, but it was close to where we live. To get clean water, I would have to walk for an hour. If I was sick because of the HIV, I would have to send one of my children to fetch the water, which meant that they would miss school. So I had to use the river. It was not good.” According to UNICEF, at least 1.8 billion people worldwide drink water that is faecally contaminated. It is therefore not surprising that 1,000 children die ever y day from diseases caused by drinking unsafe water, and a lack of proper sanitation and hygiene (World Health Organisation). To address this, P&G, in collaboration with the U.S. Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, developed a low-cost, point-of-use powdered technology. It is designed to purify
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heavily contaminated water so that it meets World Health Organisation standards for safe drinking water. P&G scientists used the innovative research behind its laundr y detergent brands to effectively fit a water treatment plant into a packet the size of a teabag. Since 2004, the P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water Programme has helped individuals to purify 10 billion litres of water from a variety of sources in over 75 countries, improving the quality of life of tens of thousands of people. For the last nine years, Rose has been using the P&G Purifier of Water sachets. One sachet provides enough drinking water for a family of five for one day. This has enabled her to improve the health and quality of life of her loved ones. Her children are able to go to school more regularly, as they are not often sick and do not have to walk long distances to fetch water. In addition, the P&G purification packets give Rose the opportunity to earn an income to support her family. Rose was trained by one of P&G’s partners, the Safe Water and AIDS Project (SWAP), and she has become an active community health advocate and an entrepreneur who sells the purifying packets to
INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION - MACRO TRENDS & DRIVERS
SPONSOR Courtesy Procter & Gamble
ONE SACHET PROVIDES ENOUGH CLEAN WATER FOR A FAMILY OF FIVE.
people in her town.
The Children’s Safe Drinking Water Programme partners with over 150 organisations around the world to share this innovation with people who need it most. In order to target places where the water purifying packets will have the most impact, P&G adapts its distribution plan according to the needs of each community. Working with its partners, P&G uses existing programmes, such as those at health clinics and schools. Building awareness of the importance of clean water is also critical to their efforts.
One P&G sachet purifies 10 litres of water in just 30 minutes using just a bucket, a spoon and a cloth The packets have also been distributed for free as part of emergency relief efforts around the world. “The effects of natural disasters like hurricanes or earthquakes last well after the catastrophe occurs,” explains Allison Tummon-Kamphuis, P&G Children’s Safe Drinking Water Programme Leader. “Those who are lucky enough to sur vive the event itself are still vulnerable, and their health is placed in jeopardy by a number of factors. One of these is access to clean water. The P&G water purifying packets, which are portable and lightweight, are therefore a vital aspect of sur viving the aftermath of these tragic occurrences.”
The Children’s Safe Drinking Water Programme has pledged to deliver 15 billion litres of clean water by 2020. Tummon-Kamphuis emphasises: “Clean water can transform the lives of families and entire communities. With our partners, we will continue our efforts to provide the power of clean water that helps children to be healthy, enables their education, and offers their families even more economic opportunities, helping them to thrive.”
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GROWING SOLUTIONS
Hemp is miracle crop with countless uses but restrictive legislation is holding us back. TONY BUDDEN – HEMP ACTIVIST
This year South Africa celebrates 20 years of Industrial Hemp research. But is this anything to celebrate? To put this into context, Canada started researching hemp at the same time and are currently growing more than 50 000 hectares a year with a market that’s rapidly expanding. South African research is based around ten two hectare plots dotted around the countr y. Commercial licenses aren’t available and the only permits granted are for research on the narcotic drug and effects of cannabis, even though hemp has no value as a recreational drug. If we grew 50 000 hectares, we could provide around 100 000 jobs and supply eco-friendly raw materials used for construction materials, nutrition, body-care products, textiles, paper and fuel.
and the medical uses of cannabis are growing rapidly. These countries have a significant head start while we’re languishing in unnecessar y research. But there’s hope. Local attitudes are changing and the demand for hemp products is climbing steadily. Hemporium, a Cape Town based hemp shop, is also celebrating its 20th year of business. We’ve seen great growth in the demand for hemp products and raw materials. However, our main limiting factor is that we have to import our materials from countries like China, Canada, France and the U.K. And thanks to the exchange rate, we currently only cater to niche of wealthy environmentally conscious individuals rather than the general population.
Hemp is one of the most versatile and eco-friendly natural resources around. It provides three main resources: the woody stalk; strong fibres from the bark and nutritious oily seeds. As prohibition is re-evaluated, many countries are realising that banning nature is an impossible task and causes more damage than good. Over 40 countries have changed legislation around the growing of industrial hemp 122
INNOVATION FOR REGENERATION - MACRO TRENDS & DRIVERS
Even the contents of a house can be created from hemp
Courtesy Tony Budden
THE HEMP PL ANT GROWS ORGANICALLY IN JUST FOUR MONTHS.
We’re involved in a three year commercial incubation research trial where our farming partner grew two hectares for research, and although we learned valuable lessons in growing hemp, the area was too small for any economies of scale and we were prevented from processing and developing local products by the restrictive permit conditions.
population live mainly off white bread, processed foods, GMO maize and sugar, they’re so deficient of omega fatty acids that their immune systems cannot function properly. By adding these essential fatty acids to their diet, they’re given an immune boost to help their bodies fight any health issues they might face. Hemp could and should be a staple part of the modern diet.
One sector where we see massive opportunities for South Africa is the construction industr y. Where the inner stalks can be used to build walls, the fibres to make natural insulation mats for the roof and floor and the stalks can be pressed into tree-free chipboards.
Another remarkable attribute of the plant is Cannabidiol (CBD) extract. CBD has anti-psychotic effects and works through the ner vous and limbic systems. It has a calmative effect and treats epilepsy, anxiety, autism and Alzheimer’s. It’s even showing promise as a potent anti-tumour agent.
Even the contents of the house can be created from hemp. Seed oil can be used in eco-friendly paints and varnishes. Soft furnishings can be made from hemp textiles. Soaps and cosmetics can be made from biodegradable hemp oil. The seeds, high in protein and immune boosting omega fatty acids, can form part of the diet of the inhabitants. And all this from one plant that grows (organically) in just four months.
For now, Hemporium provides a range of eco-friendly hemp products available at wholesale and retail, and are a stockist of Elixinol CBD hemp oil from the U.S. We even provide eco-friendly building materials and construction advice.
At the Hemp Soup Kitchen in Khayelitsha, which we helped build, we’ve been adding hemp seed oil and hemp protein powder to the soup of those with TB and HIV. The results have been nothing short of miraculous. Because the local
We cannot wait for the day when all of these products are sourced and grown locally and South Africa can prosper thanks to the jobs, houses, food and medicine that this amazing plant has to offer. Hemp truly is the green gift that keeps on giving.
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TRANSPORT TRANSFORMATION
Mellowcabs manufactures and operates new, electric mini-cabs that provide low cost, low emission, convenient taxi and transport services in cities. NEIL DU PREEZ – MELLOWCABS
These services can be provided through the mobile application that will enable seamless connections between commuters and taxi-cabs. The passenger section of the taxi-cab can be replaced with a cargo section, making the Mellowcab a really versatile delivery vehicle. Mellowcabs are in their pre-production phase; the design of the re-imagined and redefined city vehicle is complete and the building of the vehicle has begun utilising worldleading technology and capabilities.
Successful cities depend on efficient public transport working in conjunction with other transport ser vices. Mellowcab offers an individual transit ser vice, available to the public urban consumer. By the ver y nature of
TRANSPORT FACT
their ser vices, Mellowcabs are an integral element in the multimodal mobility chain.
80% of all urban vehicle trips are shorter than 4km, which is an extremely inefficient use of fuel burning engines. This provides the ideal opportunity for electric taxis to offer ser vices to the short distance commuter.
80% of all urban vehicle trips are shorter than 4km
TYPICAL OPERATING SCENARIO For Mellowcab to operate in the typical scenario they would provide a first and last mile transport ser vice within a 4km radius from a train or bus station. We can also provide an on-demand ser vice facilitated through our mobile application, allowing passengers to see where the nearest cabs are, book a cab, set a meeting point on the screen, hail a cab or even see the driver’s information. Once you arrive at your destination, the app charges your card, or provides you with a payment option.
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The electric taxi-cabs are a complement in the mobility chain and enlarge the public transport’s ser vice portfolio, filling in the gaps left by traditional mass transit options in urban areas. In a nutshell Mellowcabs extend the catchment area of public transport, offering affordable solutions for short distance journeys.
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Courtesy Mellow Cabs
PASSENGER SEATING CAN BE REPL ACED WITH A CARGO HOLD, TR ANSFORMING IT INTO A DELIVERY VEHICLE.
Not only will they form an important element of the transport system due to its connectivity function in the transport and mobility chain but also for their ability to provide an effective proxy of the private car but with some added comfort characteristics i.e there is no need to waste time looking for parking, refuelling the vehicle or ser vicing and maintaining it.
Micro-mobility will become a future transport solution to provide short distance travel. In 2013 alone, Chinese consumers purchased over 200,000 low-speed EVs, almost four times Tesla’s cumulative production through 2014! Source: Harvard Business Review, May 2015 “No one likes to commute. Yet, the real estate market shows that commuting won’t go anywhere for the next while. What we can do is make commuting more convenient. Small personal vehicles running on clean energy would be the key.”
It is important that Mellowcabs are seen to complement and reinforce public transport ser vices rather than compete with them and to show how in so doing the need for single person car ownership is negated. The ser vice will also play an invaluable role in improving customer ser vices and the competitiveness of the urban transport sector. About half of all energy is used on transportation, and people spend a huge amount of time unhappily commuting. Face-to-face interaction is still really important; people still need to move around. And housing continues to get more expensive, partially due to difficulties in transportation. We’re interested in better ways for people to live somewhere nice, work together, and have easier commutes. Specifically, lightweight, short-distance personal transportation is something we’re interested in. With these macro drivers the future success of Mellowcabs is a given.
Source: Business Insider, July 2015
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INFORMATION WILL NOT SAVE THE WORLD Communicating in a complex world requires more than just disseminating information. JAKOB TROLLBÄCK - TROLLBÄCK + COMPANY
Growing up we hunger for knowledge and over the course of history the means of getting information has gone through many transformative changes. Thousands of years ago, when knowledge was more directly linked to survival, essential information was imparted via engrossing mythological stories that gave us important guidelines to life.
Today the key ingredients of stor ytelling remain the same: Excitement that grabs us, and a conclusion that leads to an insight or wisdom.
Fast for ward to 2016. It’s hard to find any surfaces around us that are not in some way sponsored or covered with advertising. The idea that in our recent past, people were star ving for information seems unreal.
With the invention of written language, knowledge could now be stored for the future. It was a big step for ward but it wasn’t until the printing press was invented that it became possible to mass-distribute information. It was a significant moment in histor y. Educated people are much harder to control, so the printing press became revolutionar y in many ways. Civilisation took a giant step for ward. Despite the rapid spread of media in the 20th centur y, information was still fairly cumbersome to share, so people cared about the quality of the information. A good journalist didn’t want to be caught dead publishing something that wasn’t true, so the news was always verified and thoroughly fact checked. Quality was a selling point and respect was earned by its authenticity.
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It’s a very simple formula: Communication = Information + Trust Instead of inspiring us, the sheer amount of available information often has the effect of making us feel indifferent and dispirited. As it turns out, information is not knowledge, and we are not getting any smarter. If we are going to have a chance to solve the serious problems that we are facing, we have to make sure that ever ybody
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Courtesy Trollback+Company
understands that hunger, injustice and climate change are a threat to ever y single person alive. This is the whole idea behind The Global Goals initiative instigated by Richard Curtis and Project Ever yone. The challenge is that today, too many people have a picture of the world that has ver y little to do with reality, and so far, the hard facts don’t seem to cut through the information overload.
It’s a ver y simple formula: Communication = Information + Trust. We know that there is no lack of information, but who do we trust? This is a big challenge, and it should be taken ver y seriously, because if we can’t solve this problem, ever ything else will be for nothing; we will not reach our goals in time.
SO HOW DO WE COMMUNICATE BETTER? We have to create a new language with terminology and visuals that are made for broad understanding and consensus. It should be a gathering force that facilitates communication. A language that is honest, simple and humanistic. The icons and top-level copy writing for The Global Goals are just a start. We need to look at how ever ybody is communicating change: Businesses, NGO’s, governments and last but not least the UN. We must all take our communication problem seriously.
The sheer amount of available information often has the effect of making us feel indifferent and dispirited We believe that the solution is to stop simply spreading information; we need to communicate. The challenge is that communication is much trickier, since it only happens when we feel like we can trust the person that is talking to us. Yelling louder never made anyone listen.
There will always be different layers of complexity in communication for different constituencies. The language of diplomacy—complex, circumventive, convoluted, stiff and slightly pompous—will always exist. But right now, we need a new language for consensus; an honest, simple and humanistic way to describe our world.
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CLEANING UP
One consumer, one bottle, one planet: Counting the impacts of recycling actions for the economy. JANINE BASSON - PETCO
The network of network of people involved in Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Plastic Recycling celebrates its 12th successful year. PETCO has worked with the plastics industr y, community members, municipalities, NGO’s and entrepreneurs to create a robust PET plastic recycling system. We have injected R275 million of financial support into the PET recycling system. This financial support has been paid over to the recyclers and has created a ripple effect supporting collectors and new downstream product development. PET can be recycled to make the carpet in your car boot, the filling in your duvet and pillow or the ceiling insulation in your roof – all made out of recycled plastic bottles. Our collective efforts have led to a 657% increase in recycling over the period, which is close to 6.7million PET bottles collected and recycled each day in 2015. We’ve gone from 8 million bottles collected in our first year to over 2.45 billion bottles collected in 2015, we’ve helped to establish over 800 plastic recover y stations throughout South Africa, and we’ve grown our targets from 16% to 52% of post-consumer PET bottles recycled, which has helped to create income opportunities for an estimated 50 000 people. We have also helped to develop new end-uses for recycled PET. More recently, recycled PET, or rPET, is blended with 128
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virgin material for the production of new PET containers for both food and non-food products (bottles, sheet and film applications). Bottle-2-Bottle capacity represents the most effective use of the raw material by “closing the loop”, where the recycled resin can be used again and again in new bottles. For several years, converters and brand owners have quietly been making their packaging materials lighter yet more functional. Look at the humble washing-up liquid bottle, down from 120g to 50g in 30 years. And in the last 20 years, the weight of a plastic drinks bottle has typically dropped by 30%. Packaging is part of the solution and is just one component in achieving sustainability goals. It is all about reduced fuel consumption from lighter loads, and reduced food waste when plastic packaging is used. But what do we do with the material after we have used it? Unfortunately, discarded plastics have become a symbol of mankind’s waste of resources. Too much of the plastics that we use as a society are eventually thrown into landfill. This is not only a bad habit but also an inappropriate use of scarce resources, both in terms of land and the plastics themselves. What is more, municipalities are raising the
Courtesy PETCO
cost of diverting rubbish to landfill to such an extent that our bad habits here in South Africa will soon cost us a lot of money out of our own pockets. However, this is largely avoidable if, as a society, we were to think about things differently. With a little more thought, we could reduce, reuse, collect and recycle plastics much more efficiently than we currently do, and avoid the need for plastics to go to landfill altogether.
contributor to post consumer waste. Now, more than ever, is the time for a debate on the future of plastics; not just within the industr y, but more widely. How do we use our natural resources more efficiently and avoid waste as much as we can? We must be brave and begin an open and honest conversation, challenging others and ourselves to reduce, re-use, recycle and recover.
We’ve gone from 8 million bottles collected in our first year to over 2.45 billion bottles collected in 2015 This is a ver y desirable goal, but it also represents a challenge: for the plastics industr y, government policy, food manufacturers and retailers who use plastics in packaging, environmental groups who advise us on how we should live and ultimately for you as a consumer and CREATING SHARED VALUE - CIRCULAR ECONOMIES
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WHERE MAGIC HAPPENS
Great achievements are a result of a community that works together in a meaningful, engaging and empowering way to make change happen. GUY BIGWOOD - MCI GROUP
In our digitally driven world, we participate in many forms of online community. However research and experience tells us that face-to-face communication is increasingly effective and important in how we build our brand community. Events can help us to educate, entertain, inspire, forge new emotionally connected relationships and drive innovation to make our brands more of what they represent. Few people will chat with their friends about the latest banner ad for a brand, but 59% of consumers who experience event marketing tell others about that live experience within 48 hours (Event Marketing Institute). This is a major advantage for your brand, when you consider 90 percent of people trust a peers’ recommendation while only 14% trust advertisements (Socialnomics). Nothing beats word-ofmouth marketing. Forbes conducted a sur vey of 760 business executives, 84% of respondents said they preferred face to face communication as it builds stronger, more meaningful and trustworthy business relationships. Fifty three percent said that Live Experiences are the best tool for brand building amongst other marketing disciplines. So when brainstorming your stakeholder engagement strategy, make live experiences a key pillar of your plan. Think about how you will build relationships, inspire trust and connect your audience by delivering a customised experience that they will never forget. Key pointers to this are: 130
1) Stor y Do versus Stor y Tell 2) Walk the Talk 3) Measure Ever ything
STORYDOING There’s a difference between living your brand’s sustainability stor y and simply talking about it. Launch your big sustainability challenge, define an enemy and involve your audience to get involved to fix it and then participate in its stor ytelling. For example rather than just present how your company is committed to Sustainable Development Goal No 13 and Climate Change, partner with an NGO to run a workshop with children where they are trained to be climate ambassadors and involve delegates to participant in activities that commit to climate action.
WALK THE TALK It is no longer acceptable for any of us to organise an event without thinking about how we are going to minimise its environmental impact, maximise its social legacy and optimise its economic effectiveness. Start by considering the attendees experience at your
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
Courtesy MCI group
SOFT WARE COMPANY SYMANTEC, INTEGR ATE PL ANT FOR THE PL ANET ACADEMIES INTO THEIR BUSINESS EVENTS TO TR AIN CHILDREN TO BECOME CLIMATE AMBASSADORS .
MEASURE EVERYTHING
event, and consider all the key contact points where you can make your commitments real, tangible, and visible. • Procure your food locally; make your menus healthier by reducing sugar and meat and increasing ingredients that stimulate positive brain activity. • Deliberately choose eco-certified hotels and venues; design your event so that your participants can easily walk, cycle and use public transport. • Work with your designers and suppliers to design all your branding, stage-sets and booths to be made from certified materials (delete the PVC) and to be recycled. • Stor yDo your actions and results (with numbers) to all your partners, suppliers and delegates. Make it relevant to them, and then inspire them to make suggestions and be in action.
“In God we trust, all other must bring data” (W Edwards Deming). It’s critical that you have a plan to measure, analyse and transparently report on your key social, economic and environmental impacts. Work with your suppliers and use technology to collect data and to analyse audience awareness, satisfaction and behaviour change. Working with Symantec, we measured and proved that their sustainable event program increased delegate perception of Symantec as a responsible company from an average of 59% to 87%. At MCI we say that “When people meet magic happens”. Events are powerful tools to build your sustainable brand stor y and need to be a key strategy for you to create brand ambassadors.
Think about how you will build relationships, inspire trust and connect your audience A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
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Infographics:Change ChangeAgent AgentCollective Collective©© Infographics:
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
FINANCING THE GREEN ECONOMY
The power of collective action in evaluating what is needed to advance the green economy as researched by The National Business Initiative and KPMG, with support of the Green Fund (an environmental finance programme of DBSA). STEVE NICHOLLS, MARIJKE VERMAAK, ZARINA MOOLLA – NATIONAL BUSINESS INITIATIVE (NBI)
The NBI project demonstrated that there are enormous synergies and insights to be gained from collaborative planning. However this methodology has a contextual background that needs to be understood vis a vis the financial literacy of the stakeholders involved. Working with data from the Standard and Poor’s Ratings Ser vice Global Financial Literacy Sur vey, (The Economist, November, 2015), the project team showed that the greater the level of financial literacy and access to financial ser vices, the greater the degree of development implementation. Critically the research outcomes established that the role of finance in development is not well understood across stakeholder groups within South Africa. The project team therefore set out to develop a set of tools that help multi-stakeholder groups understand the role of finance within project development and then tested those frameworks with stakeholders. Even though there are multiple definitions of an economy: green, blue, circular, etc. these terms only ser ve to provide specific focus to discussions and to communities, emphasising certain aspects of development that may need additional focus. However, in reality, there is only one economy and this means it is important to continually assess the solution against a framework that considers the entire economy.
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After a lengthy and comprehensive consultative process across South Africa (the workshops around the countr y amounted to a capacity building programme focusing on the role of finance in development that reached over 150 people in positions of influence in their organisations) the 20 distilled policy recommendations will help policy developers and financial institutions in their design of policy and funding instruments (full report available on request from steven@nbi.org.za). Due to the fact that developmental finance is insufficiently understood there is a need for greater levels of inclusion of the financial sector in policy planning and project development and a concerted effort is needed to raise levels of financial literacy in policy and project developers. The commonly held view of the stakeholders involved in this research was that unlocking innovation within the financial ser vices sector required two things: - A unified (or common) understanding of the problem and price certainty. In this sweet spot, policy and intention are aligned and the full suite of financial instruments can be applied. A classic example of this type of success
Infographics: Change Agent Collective Š
is the South African Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPP), which through clever policy and some financial innovation unlocked tens of billions of Rands of private sector investment.
TOP PRIORITY INTERVENTIONS AREAS FOR GREEN 1) Economic transformation 2) Promoting public transport 3) Derelict mine rehabilitation 4) Protecting critical (high value) water catchments 5) Smart grids storage and distributed renewable energy nexus 6) The impact of high quality government spending 7) Enabling conversation and learning around finance and development
the project policy. In the South African market a project is often required to grow using only grant and concessional debt. This severely inhibits the scale and risk tolerance of project and project classes. Given that many of the inter ventions required to transform our economy are relatively new and possibly unknown they typically have a higher cost of capital than their traditional counterparts. In addition the case can be made that we underestimate the risk for traditional options based on a false sense of comfort. In both the case of new investments and established technologies the role of cost of capital, as well as the accurate estimation and timing (modelling) of cash flows is fundamental.
- Inter ventions should create a unified understanding of the problem and collective intent and/or provide a mechanism to generate cash flow or price certainty within BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE...
An intuitive glimpse into creating co-creative economies of purpose.
LENA SKI - THE GLOBAL MOVEMENT SUMMIT
What if we stopped trying to manage systems, expectations, outcomes, variables, and tasks? Instead of living in a reactive – responsive – resolving culture, what if we created ecosystems that allow for the emergence of new creations. What could be possible then? The world is shifting - fast! If we are going to move mountains, we are going to need to adapt, evolve and navigate a series of unknowns. We could tr y and stay strategic about it, the way we have always been. That is the
Think Tank. Something felt off. The energetic blueprint of it was all about chasing strategies, moulding systems, and pushing structures. This masculine-fused big brain approach designed to manage and maintain was not going
safe, calculated approach. Chances are that game’s run its course, and what got us here isn’t designed to get us any further.
to work. The world does not need more boxes. It needs more openings.
With a personal desire to ‘co-imagine’ future possibilities and a personal next-level-purpose to create an ecosystem designed to help purpose-driven-entrepreneurs thrive, I chose to step out the frameworks of the conventional into one of imagination, intuition, and innocence…and I haven’t looked back since!
Opportunities are created when we open ourselves up for creativity
THE MAGIC OF CIRCLES I believe circles are ‘wholehearted networks’ of ‘holistic connections’ creating an infinite flow of movement. They are evolving, self-sustaining, self-generative mediums that know no limits or boundaries. To step into the circle requires coming into consciousness, not process. It was in this space that hit a brick wall when I defined a particular thread of The Global Movement Summit as a 142
The pathway of intuitive design began to emerge as a process of imagineering into that ver y unknown. With it came a whole new landscape. In that instant I was reminded of a Universal wisdom: “Trust the seed. Not the form”.
A NEW LANGUAGE - COMMUNICATION & BEHAVIOUR CHANGE
MECHANISTIC APPROACHES
GENERATIVE APPROACHES
Treat organizations as machines and people as replacable parts; can be demeaning and de-energizing.
Treat organisations as conscious living systems; evoke aliveness and creativity
Focus on overcoming limitations: finding and fixing what’s wrong a problem - solving mind-set.
Focus on exploring and realising full potential - an appreciative mind-set.
Imposed from top down.
Tap into the genius of players throughout organisation
Fragmented - focusing on one part or aspect of organization’s life (e.g. culture, org. structure, leadership, engagement)
See organisations as living, interconnected whole; look at whole and parts together in ways that grow systematic understanding,
Episodic, with tightly focused outcomes
Ongoing, recursive; designed to achieve multiple and even multiplying benefits.
Impose change on people
Recognize that lasting change is based on free choice and inner commitment.
Head-oriented-focused on performance, results and metrics.
Also include the heart - that which enlivens and supports co-creative collaboration.
Seen as disruptive to “real work”
Seen as real work; change and development are woven into the fabric of dayto-day process and practices
Emphasize formal training
Recognise that organisational learning is primarily as social process and is mostly acquired informally - through action - learning and reflection, on an on-going basis.
Programmatic, packaged,linear
Heuristic; designed to grow, spread and evolve organically and on their own volition
Infographics: The Global Movement Summit
OPEN FORM STRUCTURES We get so caught up in having to control all the variables that pre-define the end results, that we lose any scope for wonder. Meanwhile, the truth is we need to drop the need to know and desire to control, and connect to something bigger. The only way I knew how to do it was to get out my way (still a work in progress) and design something from a new palette. Something open to progress, not process. The big question is how does that work?
Intuitive is the new intelligence, and that’s the new sexy Immediately we get flung into the mechanical process of compartmentalising the sum of the parts, without knowing what it is that we are dealing with. Perhaps we become too close to our own creations to manage objectivity? Or maybe, we are far too much embedded into the picture
that we cannot fathom the grand design of this Universe in motion? Perhaps these are all the wrong questions, when what we should really be asking is: • What if you could stay in the myster y of evolution, follow the thread of possibility and tune into the openings? • What if we actual chose thriveability over settling for sustainability? • What if we shift conventional structures that are defined by hierarchy, control, and power into an organic trinity governed by consciousness, purpose and ideas? We live in a world of unknowns, on a quest to make the unknown knowable. To seek the answer and bring it for ward into reality. I guess they call that Human Nature. Yet, opportunities are created when we open ourselves up for creativity (Something we are still re-learning). You don’t need to come up with wild revolutionar y ideas; you just need to connect the openings in a meaningful, valuable and purposeful way. It’s our common mission of discoverability that might just change the world and cocreate a new future. Imagine that …
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HUMANITY INC.
If mankind were a corporation, what would it take to make it a truly sustainable brand with sufficiency economy its value? DR. SIRIKUL LAUKAIKUL, DR. POOMJAI NACASKUL - THAILAND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION
Thailand Sustainable Development Foundation in its mission to serve as the network-platform for knowledge, coordination, and promotion of sustainable development, strives to disseminate the right understanding and practice of Thailand’s SUFFICIENCY ECONOMY PHILOSOPHY. Consider approaching the challenges of instilling sustainability at the heart of humanity from the perspective of talking about humanity instead of profit and the values of a sufficiency economy. The underlining concept of the sufficiency economy is moderation. Moderation is the collective mindset in striving for genuine optimality rather than exploitation and excess. Moderation is not the paucity of ambition, but richness in foresight. The question is could moderation be the brand positioning of Humanity Inc? In order for Humanity Inc. to achieve its ultimate goal—social, environmental and economic equality being ‘moderate’ must be at the center of all activities to make enough progress that people will live happily while not taking advantage of others, damaging the environment, or losing opportunities in the future. The second hallmark of Humanity Inc. is reasonableness; mindfulness to operate on the basis of causality, i.e. the causal nexus whereby each problem is recognised to be but an effect of some causes and each solution is itself a cause 144
BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
of other effects. “It’s best said that Humanity Inc. doesn’t so much solve a problem as it extinguishes the problem-enabling factors— much like how fire fighters don’t really put out the flames but instead eliminate heat, oxygen and/or fuel from the mix.” The third hallmark of Humanity Inc. is prudence with a collective mindset to fortify oneself with immunity to negative shocks and resilience to unforeseen threats. The thinking behind immunity building draws an analogy from the medical world and immune boosting techniques; the notion of built-in resilience is akin to the quality innovation in 1970s Japan (quality is considered an input to the manufacturing process, rather than simply an outcome). Prudence prepares for when conventional risk mitigation fails to capture or contain threatening scenarios. As befitting any corporate (re)branding exercise, it’s imperative that one draws from the spiritual roots, the DNA, of the enterprise itself.
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Now, the real Humanity Inc., we have to believe already possesses MODERATION-REASONABLENESS-PRUDENCE genes in its DNA. In addition, Thailand’s King Bhumibol Aduyadej (a proponent of the Sufficiency Economy) also suggests that there are two governance conditions that are integral to the (re)branding of Humanity Inc.
around the world. There is no one single solution that fits all, and we welcome any opportunity to work together, with all kinds of organisations, to create a better Humanity Inc. be it in the form of a personal brand, a product brand or corporate brand; we all can become sustainable brands for a better world.
Moderation is not the paucity of ambition, but richness in foresight These are knowledge and virtue. These two conditions act as external factors required to make decisions that align the internal and external values of the brand building. With this DNA, we believe that Humanity Inc. will become a global ‘corporation’ that can offer value to all its stakeholders. We also believe that the model of this Humanity Inc. can be adapted to any enterprise or organisation that wants to become a ‘sustainable brand’. Sharing knowledge, exchanging practices and co-creating the future are our main activities both in Thailand and BETTER BUSINESS - LEADERSHIP & STRATEGY
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HOW WOULD YOU CHANGE THE WORLD NOW?
Notes for your bright ideas:
Published by CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE©
Published by CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE©
DOODLE SPACE
Notes for your bright ideas:
Published by CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE©
Published by CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE©
HOW NOW WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR – Melissa Baird CREATIVE DIRECTOR – Deon Robbertze PROJECT DIRECTOR – Hannah Walker LAYOUT AND DESIGN – Cameron Chase INFOGRAPHIC DESIGNERS – Alethia Erchen and Cameron Chase COPY EDITOR – Trivesh Vassen CONTRIBUTORS – Our collective of thought leaders, change agents, specialist brand custodians and sponsors are acknowledged for their contribution on each page. COPY AND PICTURE ASSISTANT – Kelley Wake PRINTING – with grateful thanks to Paarl Media, a division of Novus Holdings, for their printing sponsorship.
PUBLISHED FOR SUSTAINABLE BRANDS BY: CHANGE AGENT COLLECTIVE 75 HARRINGTON STREET CAPE TOWN SOUTH AFRICA Contact: deon@thechangeagent.co.za
©Change Agent Collective 2016: While due care has been taken to ensure the accuracy of the information presented, the editor and publisher cannot be held responsible for unforeseen errors that may arise. The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher. All editorial and advertising contributions are accepted on the understanding that the contributor either owns or has obtained all necessary copyrights and permissions. The publisher does not endorse any claims made in the publication by or on behalf of any organisation or products.
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