Business, sustainability, and design: the winning trio
In my latest article, I shared why a more strategic and integrated approach to business and sustainability is key to helping organizations move from nice pledges to the actual progress we need to address the environmental and social issues we face today while staying successful.
Yet, there was one thing I didn’t cover: how to get there?
With this second article, I’d like to bring forward what I think is the missing piece of the business and sustainability puzzle that could help us unlock the full value of this approach: design. To get started, let me first paint the picture of the main contributions that each discipline brings to the table.
What Business has to offer:
Business here refers to the common management functions in almost any organization today, such as strategy, sales and marketing, finance, operations, and customer support.
Industry: expertise in how the sector works, its dynamics, rules, and best practices
Strategy: guidance on priorities, pathways, positioning, and business model
Operations: steer on delivery models, and compliance considerations
Finance: help in assessing viability, budget implications, and building the business case
Language: proficiency in using the right arguments and vocabulary to mobilize leadership to reach desired outcomes
This acumen helps better inform and contextualize solutions while increasing their likelihood of moving into implementation.
What Sustainability has to offer:
Sustainability here refers to corporate social responsibility work. Think about ESG or impact work as an umbrella term.
ESG: expertise in environmental, social, and governance matters rooted in science, ethics, and systems thinking, including insights on best practices, players, and trends
Risk: skills in assessing risk and developing mitigation and adaptation strategies that build business resilience
Programs: knowledge in running or participating in impact programs of different scales, involving multiple stakeholders across the value chain
Monitoring and evaluation: guidance on how to build systems and processes that expand business performance tracking to integrate a whole sustainability lens into it
Data and reporting: expertise and rigor in collecting and reporting on impact-related activities and progress, ensuring compliance with increasing regulations in the space
This expertise helps ensure ambitions translate into informed solutions that avoid all forms of “washing”, go beyond incrementalism, and drive real positive impact on people and the planet.
What Design has to offer:
Design here refers to design with the big “D”; pointing to all the people who adopt its principles, methods, and mindset to address complex challenges and perform their work. This can span from product and service to business and systems design.
Empathy: proficiency in placing the needs of stakeholders, direct and indirect, present and future, human and not, at the core of the creative process to maximize desirability
Sense-making: expertise in connecting dots across seemingly diverse information to help grasp the problem space, uncover new insights, and inform solutions design
Creativity: knowledge in creating conditions that drive out-of-the-box thinking, unleash imagination, and spark optimism, together with discipline-based craft for solution design (e.g. UI, product, service)
Experimentation: guidance on how to nurture a growth mindset and mitigate risk by building experiments that test assumptions and inform development
Collaboration: mastery in facilitating participation and collaboration amongst different audiences, breaking silos, and helping find common ground to drive better outcomes
This knowledge helps create more intention and cohesion in the creative process, promotes innovation, and increases the odds of bringing desirable solutions to the world.
Based on my experience these are the main contributions of each discipline. Now, you might wonder why combining just two of the three isn’t enough to build thriving organizations that contribute to achieving real sustainability at pace. The answer is simple: leaving one out consistently misses a vital ingredient for effective progress. Let me unpack this.
When we omit Business: “short-lived”
Excluding business from the conversation undermines efforts to integrate sustainability-focused visions and initiatives into corporate strategic agendas. Without buy-in and resources, initiatives struggle to gain traction, limiting our ability to drive meaningful change in the core business. At best, they remain well-meaning but unsustainable efforts, mostly reliant on employees’ passion and donor generosity rather than operating as integrated, strategic solutions. The problem is that this is plain philanthropy, not the wiser approach we should aim for.
When we omit Sustainability: “status quo”
Ignoring sustainability is a failure to address the realities of our time. Taking out that in an ideal world, caring about people and the planet should be a moral concern, from a business perspective ignoring these systemic issues is a significant risk to survival. It equals turning a blind eye to evolved customers, talent, and society's demands, passively accepting reputational, compliance, and supply chain risks, and essentially being okay with slowly becoming irrelevant. This risk still applies when sustainability is accounted for as a thing to call out but no real investment is made to have the proper subject-matter expertise at the table. At most, the organization does no harm, only marginal improvements are achieved, PR gets a short-term boost but the high-impact solutions and the deep strategic changes required in the core business do not happen.
When we omit Design: “fragmentation”
Ignoring the value of design reduces the chances of adopting a holistic, cohesive, and integrated approach to defining and implementing sustainability strategies and initiatives; while potentially missing out on more desirable and creative ways to solve problems. This limits the transformative power that sustainability visions can bring to the business. Without design, the risk is that impact-oriented initiatives remain siloed in functional departments, their synergies go unseen, and the pace at which sustainability goals are achieved becomes slower. This is due to poor integration of solutions in core value creation, delivery, and capture processes such as a company’s products or services.
To effectively integrate business and sustainability for maximum impact, there’s only one approach that truly works—and unsurprisingly, for me it’s the one that brings design into the equation.
When we bring the three disciplines together: “the sweet spot”
Integrating business, design, and sustainability is when the magic happens. Decisions become informed and intentional, leading to impact solutions that are robust, strategically aligned, and seamlessly incorporated into the organizational fabric. This alignment brings cohesive action and the impetus to drive innovation, transformation, and positive systemic change. When the three work in sync, the gap we often find between business and sustainability, strategy and action, can be bridged and organizations are prepared to succeed in today’s new context.
The truth is that the challenges and opportunities of our time demand a strategic and integrated approach to business and sustainability that can effectively happen only when design is also considered a critical piece of the puzzle. Organizations that invest in developing expertise and fostering collaboration across these three core disciplines will be better equipped to lead with purpose and adapt to change. It’s not enough to dabble in one or two - true impact comes from aligning all three to deliver coordinated action that drives the meaningful transformation required to build resilient organizations that genuinely contribute to a people and planet-positive future.
This is no easy feat, but good things rarely come from comfort zones. So, why not leap?
