Measuring Your Way to Sustainable Improvement

photo credit: Nick J Webb

Ordinarily, Wal-Mart would be a company this writer personally would have some trouble profiling on this site. But an article at ecofrenzy about metrics-driven sustainable business deals with the topic of sustainability and measurement, and Wal-Mart’s example in the post is a good one:

Rand Waddoups, senior director of business strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart described Wal-Mart’s four part journey to sustainability, beginning with consensus building around need for sustainability, moving into an evangelist phase, and then to a clear recognition of the business case of sustainability. The fourth step, where they are headed today, is the ability to measure and track progress with sustainability metrics. They’ve found that suppliers that provide poor products are often also mistreating their employees, and cheating when it comes to factory compliance. So holding suppliers to a higher standard is good for business.

Those stages outlined in the post look a great deal like the phases Schopenhauer described that all truth must pass through:

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

Let’s look at the stages Waddoups described again.

First, there was “consensus building.” If you’ve ever been through this stage in a typical work environment, you’ll recognize that it is in many cases the same as Schopenhauer’s first stage, ridicule. No doubt overcoming the skeptics will be part of the process of building consensus. How do you do this? Your best bet is thorough and careful preparation of the business case.

Next, there was the “evangelist phase.” In other words, someone or a small group of committed people seek every opportunity to advocate for the program being introduced. Why do they need to do this? Because of Schopenhauer’s second stage: it is violently opposed. An easy mistake to make at this stage is to assume that if the executive leadership is on board, the employees will eventually come around. That may happen in time, but there will be loss of morale, loss of trust in the leadership, and the opportunity cost will be the momentum the program could have gained from top-to-bottom support. Instead, it makes sense to use this phase to educate the whole company in ways that relate to their perspectives.

Third, “clear recognition of the business case.” In other words, it is accepted as self-evident. Schopenhauer nails it again.

The bonus step mentioned in the Wal-Mart article is the one you should be hoping to get to: being able to measure and track progress. If it can’t be measured, it can’t be held up for accountability, and accountability is necessary for the transparency and full-circle consensus-building that will come with settling into the new program.

But what to measure? Well, there is a whole emerging body of knowledge on metrics for sustainability, if that’s the program you’re introducing, but in general, bear in mind that analytics tends to go through its own phases on the way to useful measurement, including an almost inevitable phase of information overload. Once you’re reached that point, you’ll want to  cut the clutter and get right to the useful stuff. Over at HarvardBusiness.org, Emma Stewart covers a wealth of information on the history and viability of sustainability analysis, and discusses the need to reduce the noise in metrics:

First, in streamlining metrics, practicality should reign supreme. New indicators, like all other management techniques, must pass the test of cost-effectiveness. This means that a certain level of inaccuracy may be optimal and only issues material to the company should be covered. This will also save you from unwieldy amounts of data collection and drawn out consensus building processes.

Introducing a new program is not usually an easy process, but if you have reason to believe that it matters for the business, for the community, and/or for the world at large, you can find a great number of resources to help you make the case and guide it through the phases it must pass through. And when it launches and you’ve been able to measure its success, come back and tell us about it, OK?