Collaboration on sustainability
Over the past month, I have engaged with hundreds of IEMA members to discuss how organisations are embedding sustainability and environmental capabilities into their ways of working and those of their supply chains.
The workshop sessions allowed members to reflect on the increasing expectation that organisations demonstrate their commitment to sustainable practices when tendering for contracts.
It was also great to hear examples of the positive business impacts being generated by suppliers who are taking a lead and engaging clients in their own environmental initiatives.
The clear message from these sessions is that professionals want to discuss with their peers what sustainability measures work, with whom they work and in what order, not just to discuss comparative financial or carbon savings.
An emphasis emerged on reflecting on successes and failures and identifying trends, barriers and responses that can help others to achieve similar progress more rapidly in the future.
As such, the workshops provided a valuable opportunity for collaborative learning and sharing our experiences of barriers and the approaches we have taken to overcome them.
The workshops have also made a valuable contribution to the development of IEMA’s forthcoming position statement on skills for a sustainable economy, which will be launched in December at the House of Commons.
Members discussed the opportunities that can help us address the major barriers to making progress on sustainability, such as short-termism in business decision-making and regulatory uncertainty.
However, the main outcomes from the workshops focused on organisational approaches to embedding sustainable thinking and the role of the value chain as a system to drive innovation, collaboration and more rapid progress than merely acting in isolation can produce.
