Implementing sustainability lens in business steering

Sustainability is nowadays an integral part of every company’s strategy and business targets. In practice, work towards these set targets requires proper transparency to company’s and its supply chains’ sustainability impacts (e.g. impact on climate, biodiversity). This transparency (i.e. ‘sustainability lens’) should be taken into use in company’s tactical and operative business steering efforts to ensure that the strategic ambitions and sustainability goals truly drive everyday business decision making.

Last week, August’s article on sustainability lens in business steering was published in Boardview journal, a membership magazine of Directors’ Institute Finland (DIF). The article contains, for example, August’s framework to evaluate your company’s maturity in terms of applying sustainability lens in business steering practices. This framework builds on the strong foundation that August has in supporting its clients in developing their business steering efforts (e.g. planning, forecasting and reporting).

Based on August’s experiences, the implementation of sustainability lens in business steering practices has four maturity stages as shown below:

The first stage is about building reporting and related transparency to sustainability impacts in order to meet the regulatory requirements (e.g. CSRD). In the second stage, companies adopt sustainability lens in the long-term horizon steering (e.g. seeking to finance their investments). In the third stage, companies have embedded sustainability lens in the tactical steering horizon including, for example, offering development, price steering and marketing activities. In the final stage, sustainability lens is an integral part in optimizing everyday business decisions (e.g. sales and operations planning).

In the DIF article, August presents various case examples of companies in different maturity stages and practical means to successfully implement sustainability lens in business steering.
The full article is available in Finnish by clicking here.

Have any questions? Please do not hesitate to contact us:

Juha Martikainen, Partner
+358 40 756 4686

Tero Tiitu, Manager
+358 50 544 3784

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