The internet amplifies human capacity to achieve, and teams always work more effectively than individuals. Yet at present these truths are not reflected in the ways in which businesses manage for or report on their initiatives towards sustainability.
So, on one level, this makes this is a simple question to answer. Accelerated Sustainability is the new web-driven collaborative form of sustainability reporting and management.
Unlike other forms of sustainability reporting, Accelerated Sustainability can drive change like this:
Accelerated Sustainability comprises the use of modern tools of internet collaboration to help organisations improve their sustainability records and propel them rightwards on the Dunphy sustainability scale.
Accelerated Sustainability’s momentum is “accelerated” because:
- The absence of these tools would make it much harder (even unlikely or impossible) for such ideas to be generated, shared and acted on collaboratively.
- The common benchmark afforded by Dunphy brings clarity, making it easy for users to understand where they are and in which direction they must travel to make a real difference.
- The positive feedback a company gets as a return on working more effectively and collaboratively to this end will manifest in 1) its will to communicate (“report”) its advances, 2) a heightened ability to build on its advances, and 3) increase its reputation for doing so.
- A committed team, engaged with purpose can take on even the biggest of competitors.
Principal tools
Accelerated Sustainability as presently envisaged will typically engage three core tools, between which there is some overlap in functions and applications (but, hey, this is an infant, if inevitable, way of doing things):
Wikis provide the means by which ideas can be shared and commented on in real time, and through which the documentation can be developed that drives a sustainability/reporting initiative. (What’s a wiki?)
Blogs: When workers are distributed across more than one campus, internal blogs can enable those with common interests to find each other. (What’s a blog?)
Social bookmarking: References to relevant web resources can be shared by teams and tagged them with commonly understood terms. (What’s social bookmarking?)
Accelerated Sustainability can not be driven by technology alone any more than having a computer alone can manage a business. What the technology does is ease communication, but the technology itself can be used at no cost.
But there is a simple rule: the better a company gets at working together and reporting on its advances, the greater will be its movement on the Dunphy scale, the more persuasive will be its competitive story, the more attractive it will become as a place to work and the greater and more robust its reputation and its profitability. Investors, lenders and insurers tend to like this kind of story.
Work on authentic sustainability within a company pays off as it builds robustness into the very fibre of a business by removing obstacles to genuine progress, not just by forging improvements in environmental stewardship.
Genuine progress through openness
The freedom of ideas enabled by free-to-user technologies changes the competitive landscape. Using “open source” principles, Accelerated Sustainability aims to provide a clear, open framework that any organisation's sustainability champions can use to agitate for change within their businesses.
It aims to build on the wisdom of those who can help develop best sustainability practices within Australia’s and even businesses around the world. And over time, it aims to develop a base of sustainability metrics by which any company can be judged as a potential supplier.
Origins
Accelerated Sustainability is a product of its age but inspired in significant measure by the work of three leading business thinkers:
Andrew McAfee is a Harvard Business professor in IT who coined the expression “Enterprise 2.0” for the use of social media technologies within a business. Enterprise 2.0’s proponents advocate the use of Web 2.0 tools - blogs and wikis - as vital channels for unleashing creativity and innovation within organisations. The traditional barriers to innovation, they suggest, result when people with ideas are hindered by distance or hierarchy, or simply by not knowing who is who, who is qualified, interested or accomplished in what, or even that each other exist. McAfee and his supporters suggest that such tools can open an organisation to the new, emergent learning that builds on the reservoir of talent, wisdom and ‘human capital’ – the specialised, personal knowledge – of those within it, wherever it resides.
Gary Hamel is a Harvard professor in management, whose 2007 The Future of Management* talks of the fully web-enabled company as something few if any of us have yet seen. Hamel is the author of the expression “core competence” and a passionate advocate for innovation. In The Future of Management, Hamel suggests that the next wave of innovation will not be in product and process alone, but also in the nature of management itself. He argues that current management practice is ill adapted to modern problems as it applies 20th century solutions to 21st century challenges.
Peter Senge, who lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the author of several books, including The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization** which takes as its focus the practice of systems thinking within organisations. He is now also the author of The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organisations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World***.
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* The Future of Management, Harvard Business School Press, 2007
** The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Random House, 1990
*** The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organisations are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2008
