driving organisational performance, sustainably
What does Agile-Sustainability offer?
“Exciting new option – becoming Sustainable now also brings the benefits of becoming agile and more resilient”
At the heart of the methodology are the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We encourage you to find the goals that resonate with your organisation’s skills and competences and that trigger excitement in your stakeholder community.
What is our purpose?
Our purpose is to support your organisation’s sustainability journey by offering a methodology to support the transformation. This methodology helps you by:
-
- linking your sustainability program to key organisational objectives
- helping your organisation become more agile and better able to thrive in a disorderly world
- building innovative, collaborative partnerships with customers, suppliers and other key stakeholders
- doing less harm by becoming more environmentally focused, saving water, waste and greenhouse gas emissions and in the process saving money
- doing more good by using your unique skills and expertise
…and do all this driven by your existing team and aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals
What is Agile-Sustainability?
For organisations who want to accelerate and improve their financial and environmental performance, Agile-Sustainability provides a methodology and approach to deliver and exceed expectations. This program is intended to be driven and managed by an in-house team, led by a vision set by senior leadership and based on ‘User Stories’ . These mean that making changes are personal to key stakeholders and vital to the organisation’s future.
How confident are you in achieving your sustainability goals?
Regardless of where your organisation is on the sustainability journey, Agile-Sustainability could help you by putting the things that matter to your key stakeholders at the centre of your plan and ensuring your Sustainability objectives align with your organisational objectives.
What financial support is available?
There may be funding available for specific carbon-reduction activities. Perhaps we can help to find some to support the business case.
Starting your sustainability journey will drive new capabilities within your organisation through Agile-Sustainability
Do Less Harm
The starting point is to gather some user stories from across the organisation on the ways that you can:
- – Reduce Waste
- – Reduce Water usage
- – Reduce CO2e emissions
Other organisations have discovered that these activities can also lead them to save money.
Do More Good
How can you organisation use you unique capabilities to ‘Do more good’? In order to give this the best chance of success, these goals should be important to stakeholders and align with business objectives. For example a water company supporting a water charity providing water and sanitation services in developing countries.
Critical Success Factors
- – Management support
- – Having the right team
- – A communication plan
- – Active leadership engaged in the program
- – Project initiated with a leadership vision
- – etc
The Agile Team
This is the multi-disciplinary team from across the organisation responsible for delivering the change. This Team has some shared values:
- – Commitment
- – Focus
- – Openness and honesty
- – Courage to speak up on impediments and challenges
- – Respect for each other
They are, arguably, the most important people in the organisation.
Agile-Sustainability aims
The one common factor for all humanity is that we all live on the one planet. As things currently stand, we are putting future generations at risk due to our current and past actions. Human activity, our excessive use of our planet’s riches, especially fossil fuels, has created the climate emergency.
We are all, certainly in the developed countries, partially responsible for creating this climate crisis, but we do have the opportunity to limit the amount of climate change if we act now. We can do this by changing the ways that we use our planet’s resources and specifically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. This sounds easy, but we know that’s it not and the urgency of the challenge mean that this needs to start today, right now. However, we also need to help our companies and other organisations to make different choices. We need to ask ourselves some important questions, for example, do we really need to take that flight? Do we really need to use plastic bottles in our canteen? Do we need to throw away as much stuff?
The aim of Agile-Sustainability is to help organisations develop and implement a plan to change. It is intended to be a practical approach to delivering change within your organisation, a helpful starting point, to be adjusted and adapted to suit your needs. Depending on your organisation’s starting point, this change may be larger or smaller. Sustainability is the responsibility of every person in the organisation, but led by the core team. Agile-Sustainability provides a model for change, this will in due time, help your organisation to become more agile and adaptable.
Extending Agile-Sustainability – moving to AntiFragile
In Nassim Taleb’s 2013 book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Taleb states:
”Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better”
This is a very relevant concept which can be adopted by organisations to become hugely strong and adaptive, clearly important in the post-Covid19 world.
Some of the new organisational capabilities developed during an Agile-Sustainability program should, by their nature, help move an organisation towards becoming AntiFragile.
Specifically, 2 areas that contribute towards an organisation moving towards being AntiFragile are Innovation and Collaboration. These are reviewed in the Agile-Sustainability Handbook.
“The ‘holy grail’ of success is to embed sustainability into the mindset and behaviours of employees. This is so that every action taken, every decision made, every product developed, every raw material sourced, and every interaction with a stakeholder is done in a responsible way that together defines a sustainable organisation. Sustainable business is not a small team of champions doing great things; it is the whole organisation having positive impacts.”
Nadine Exter, Embedding sustainability into mindset and behaviours of employees
“It is in your hands, to make a better world for all who live in it.”
Nelson Mandela
Improving financial and environmental performance through sustainability –
Improving financial and environmental performance through sustainability –
Improving financial and environmental performance through sustainability –
Access 15 minute Agile-Sustainability overview.
About us:
Agile-Sustainability is an offering from Hesys Sustainability Services.
Hesys was setup in March 2020, to support SMEs become more sustainable. In order to support this objective, Agile-Sustainability was developed.
The Hesys founder is Hugh Thomas-Davies, the Chief Agile-Sustainability Advocate. He has a long background in the technology industry, with a 20 year focus on collaborations & partnerships but with a long-term interest and commitment to sustainability, including a MBA dissertation focused on Corporate Social Responsibility.
To contact us, either
Call +44 7879 420263
Email [email protected]