For us, the simplest way to think about sustainability integration:

How materially relevant impacts (in other words sustainability risks relevant to the products or goods you provide) are embedded into business decisions including strategy development and funding.

At the core of business decisions is the allocation of resources (time, expertise, money, materials, etc.) in pursuit of your mission.

Where you spend your money is the simplest reflection of what you value.

Here’s three reasons why integrating sustainability into your business operations matters:

1. You will struggle to make real, lasting progress on your sustainability goals without robust integration into your business decisions.

2. Your sustainability function will be chronically underfunded because the work involved is not effectively linked to the full value it creates.

3. Fewer people will feel responsible for addressing sustainability impacts as part of their jobs and the level to which they choose to collaborate on those efforts.

Here's why we start by spending time understanding how things current work:

We can't hope to effectively change what we don't understand.

In other words, how can you get where you want to go if you don't where you are?

So start your integration initiative by documenting the current ways of working - defining your "current state".

That includes answering the following:

• Who is responsible for making decisions?
• What types of decisions do they own?
• How do they make those decisions?
• When do they make those decisions?

(You may notice that WHY is missing - we'll get into that a bit below)

For more mature businesses lots of decision-making happens before the budget.

That includes the development of goals, strategy, and operational plans.

For many younger and high-growth businesses the operational processes can be less established and sometimes less rigorous.

But in all honesty, we've seen a lack of rigor when it comes to these kinds of processes even at older, well established businesses.

So if you don't really have a strategic plan or an annual operating plan...that's okay.

One of the great secondary benefits about pursuing sustainability integration is that it will really shine a light on weaknesses in you business operations.

So you'll know where to improve them and in the process you'll have a hand in shaping them.

Once we’re able to articulate how decisions currently happen (our current state) we can formulate the best way to integrate sustainability considerations into the existing process.

That's what we call our "desired future state".

We've found that the easiest way to go about defining your desired future state is by taking a look at your answers from the current state exercise.

How would you change them to make your sustainability efforts more effective in the future?

What's missing from your current state but needs to be built or designed?

Now we know where we want to go - what your ideal "future state"should look like.

Now we have a clear understanding of where we are and where we want to go.

What's the best way to get from point A to point B as effectively as possible?

Use a map.

Or what we sometimes call an "Integration Roadmap".

The roadmap identifies the what/when/who/how for sustainability integration to move the organization from current state to future state.

When building this plan we also attempt to reference (at a minimum) and integrate (ideally) other related business transformation initiatives (e.g. updating legacy tech platforms).  

Typically our roadmap breaks out the relevant business processes into three “foundational elements”.

While the nature and extent may vary by company, these elements must addressed in some way for sustainability to be effectively integrated into business decision-making:

1. Goals

2. Strategy

3. Planning & Governance

Importantly, they not all need to be integrated on the same timeline or to the same extent - the nature of this transformation depends on the needs of the business.

The reason we break them into these three buckets is because it helps to organize them by a rational hierarchy as they would occur in an integrated business planning process (goals>strategy>planning>governance).

The most challenging integration, and the most important in our experience, is the last one - operational planning & governance.

You may be wondering where a business mission fits into sustainability integration efforts?

We’ve decided not to include a discussion about mission as it relates to sustainability integration in this blog for a couple of reasons.

In short: Is it helpful to have sustainability called out in a mission statement? Absolutely.

Is it mandatory for successful integration? No.

While having sustainability and impact embedded in the mission statement of an organization can certainly help when it comes to the transformation necessary to successfully integrate sustainability, it’s not a requirement.

In our experience, changing an existing mission statement can also be an incredibly time consuming and challenging process.

The amount of time and effort to successfully change a mission statement can be applied to integration in the operational areas of business decision making with greater impact and speed.

Also, mission statements can often be interpreted to mean many things, which makes them pliable enough to justify many strategic decisions.