The Step‐by‐Step Guide to Sustainability Planning: How to Create and Implement Sustainability Plans in any Business or Organization

Citation

McVanel‐Viney, S. (2009), "The Step‐by‐Step Guide to Sustainability Planning: How to Create and Implement Sustainability Plans in any Business or Organization", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 30 No. 7, pp. 688-690. https://doi.org/10.1108/01437730910991718

Startling figures tell us, time and time again, that our change transformation efforts fail on average 70 percent of the time (Kotter, 1995). Organizations, their management teams, and other key professionals such as organizational development specialists, know how essential it is to build sustainability into change plans from the start. This is a disciplined activity requiring specialized skills and focused dedication; unless organizations have in‐house experts, they must look to external resources, from books to consultants, to provide frameworks, strategies, tools, and expert advice.

This particular resource, The Step‐by‐Step Guide to Sustainability Planning, offers practical how‐to advice in a language that any professional can understand, and is a follow‐up to their last book, The Business Guide to Sustainability. Complete with exercises, tips, and examples, the authors have attempted to empower the reader with the confidence and tools necessary to walk their organizations, their colleagues and themselves through the sustainability planning process.

It is important to mention that this book has a particular emphasis on environmental sustainability efforts. Given the growing number of organizations considering “green leadership” approaches, the context of this book could be quite timely; the authors propose that 75 percent of large corporations already produce sustainability reports for their investors and other stakeholders. For those who have not yet embraced it, the so‐called “triple bottom line” – social, economic, and environmental – is making more and more sense, and may link easily with existing organizational values grounded in social responsibility.

Given that this book is geared to people who plan, lead, and report sustainability efforts, there is a strong emphasis on the day‐to‐day activities of building, implementing, evaluating, and monitoring sustainability initiatives, from major corporate‐wide change to smaller projects. The authors' style of writing, practicality of instruction and proliferation of case examples will also lend itself nicely to learning environments; professors may be well advised to incorporate such a reference as a supplementary reading for students to bridge the theory and practice gap.

A particularly helpful place to start is the chapter “Developing an implementation strategy and choosing projects” where the authors outline a ten‐step planning process that can be adapted to most sustainability projects. These steps are linked to well‐established change management best practices, and are flavoured with “lessons from the field” (no doubt from their years of combined experience as environmental sustainability consultants). Readers will benefit from helpful reminders such as: link your sustainability efforts with familiar programs to avoid a “flavour of the month” cynicism; use emotional appeal to create visibility to your project (e.g. “save the salmon” has more allure than “improve water quality”); keep some project under wraps until you have results to show while ensuring you produce quick wins; and focus on engaging people by finding ways to make your effort the most exciting, honouring, inspiring and fun initiative in the organization.

The chapter “Developing a sustainability metrics and reports” provides fundamental principles for selecting and utilizing metrics. The authors illustrate how to balance the needs of identifying stretch goals with the art of setting a realistic bar (too high a bar and you can easily generate employee cynicism). They outline the many data traps to avoid such as timeframes not lining up, the inconsistent logging of data, unavailability of accurate data, and irrelevance for your target stakeholder group. For readers who will be using this book as a reference for environmental sustainability, this chapter lists critical metrics and in the later chapter, “Developing effective management systems” outlines how to best document, track and monitor data in a way that will increase learning from project to project, reduce risk and liability, and enhance proactive planning.

Moving sustainability efforts from project work to an embedded part of strategic processes is, no doubt, the intent of anyone reading this book. The chapter “Determining the structures needed to manage the effort” identifies the people, roles, responsibilities, and systems that support sustainability efforts. You may also find the six activities outlined on developing training and communication plans or events to be of great use to sustainability and other projects.

For the novice, student, or environmental steward, this book offers practical advice and strategies to address current trends and best practices in the field. For those with advanced change management understanding, broad sustainability implementation needs (i.e. beyond environmental sustainability) or a senior leaders perspective on the subject, you may not have this on your own shelf, but will know of another useful resource to recommend to others.