Dean Sanders [00:00:00] 
So the story goes Stuart was on a safari in Southern Africa. And went out actually with his wife with a guide out into the bush. And an elephant came out and started heading quite fast towards them, but then stopped and went into the, forest.

And Stuart said to the guide, phew, that was lucky. We got lucky there. The elephant has gone. And the guide said, shut up. Stand behind me in single file. Don't say a word. Your wife stand behind you. And sure enough, the elephant circled back out and then with ears and trunk and the whole thing very aggressively started charging towards them.

And the guide put up a rifle, not to shoot, but just as a sign of size and scale and shouted a certain word at this elephant, which thankfully worked and the situation eased and the elephant did go away. 

Next day, the same guide says, hey, we're going out on the river. So Stuart and his wife get into the canoe and they head us onto the river and the guide says, hey, look elephants by the riverbank. Would you like to go and see and get close to the elephants? To which, Stuart and his wife said, well, we didn't have such a great encounter with the elephants yesterday.

He said elephants are never attacked from the water. They're not used to being attacked in the water, so they will be very peaceful as we glide in our canoe towards them. Next thing, in the canoe, they are canoeing under the elephants, through the elephants, literally the water and the pond weed dripping on them, and there's no anger. There's no chaos, there's no emotional explosion of elephant anger. 

And, so what we did is we said that, if the elephant is a metaphor for the planet and the world and, our relationship with the ecosystem, on the first day nature is angry. We are depleting those natural resources and the planet is fighting back. And if you want to solve that situation in the short term, is to comply. The guide says, stand behind me. Do as I say. That's the compliance agenda.

When you comply, the only thing that happens is you survive. You don't just want to spend your whole life not being killed by an elephant. You want to get to day two when you have the fantastic experience of reconnecting and reengaging with the elephants in a harmonious way, in a, integrated way where we're balancing human activity with the wonders of nature. And that was the experience of day two. 

And interestingly, what it meant is you have to take, you literally get into a different, vehicle, and you re-approach in a completely different way. So we found this metaphor of a day one survival compliance and a day two safari, which is re-approaching nature, re-approaching the challenge of sustainability with a completely different perspective, a very powerful one.

And the adventure of sustainable performance is the adventure of canoeing under, with, through the elephants, not running away from them and hoping they're not going to stampede you and kill you.

Siân Harrington [00:03:18]

 Hey, everyone. Welcome to Work's Not Working, a show about forward-thinking people leaders, innovators, and academics, and how they think we can fix work to make it more meaningful, healthy, inclusive, and sustainable. Brought to you by The People Space. 

I'm Siân Harrington, and on the show today, Dean Sanders, on the urgent need to move from viewing sustainability as a tick box compliance exercise to focusing on sustainable performance and leadership, if we are to navigate quickly out of the climate catastrophe we are facing today. We are at a pivotal moment, what Dean calls the reality of now.

From freshwater depletion to rampant deforestation, the clock is ticking. But there's hope. This generation, armed with facts, has the unique chance to steer us away from the worst climate impacts. Business leaders play a critical role here. Yet too often, sustainability descends into a checklist of metrics to comply with regulations and customer demands. This reactive approach squanders resources and misses the bigger picture.

Later on we'll discover the difference between sustainability and sustainable performance and how the latter is a driver of innovation, growth and competitive edge. We'll see how we can reframe our approach and move from greenwashing to real action and here's some examples of businesses doing just that.

And we find out how we can steer the metaphorical canoe Dean mentioned at the start of this episode through all the obstacles to get to true innovation and competitive edge, and how HR and people leaders can be the stern's people at the helm of this canoe. 

But before this, let me tell you a bit more about Dean. Dean is chief enterprise officer at Global Sustainability Consultancy Group and Thesis, and the Founder and Chairman of GoodBrand, a corporate social innovation consultancy.

Prior to establishing Good Brand, he held a number of international marketing and sales positions at Kraft Foods. He's also an honorary fellow at Durham University Business School.

Dean believes that imagination and courage and a commitment to serve the common good are the hallmarks of the wise leaders of the future. His book, The Adventure of Sustainable Performance, Beyond ESG Compliance to Leadership in the New Era, co-authored by founder of Anthesis, Stuart McLachlan, he of the elephant story we just heard, aims to help leaders reset their ambitions for sustainability and organizational performance. So I start by asking Dean to tell me why he got into sustainability in the first place. 

Siân Harrington [00:05:54] 

Dean, thank you so much for joining me today, and we are going to talk about sustainability and sustainable performance. just To kick off, could you tell me a bit about how you got involved in this area? 

Dean Sanders [00:06:04] 

Thanks Siân for the invitation. My background, how did I get into sustainability and sustainable performance, it was a journey, actually like so much of sustainability and sustainable performance, and my journey started in multinational business working as a marketing and sales executive where I really learned, more than anything else, the power that brands have to unlock change and be that sort of changing behaviour, changing attitude. And I was always very intrigued by this. And, as my career unfolded, I became quite interested and intrigued by brands with social purpose like Ben & Jerry and the Body Shop and Fairtrade.

And I made the connection that there was an opportunity to use the power of brands to have a positive impact in the world. So really my journey has been about combining the first stage of my life, which was as a marketing executive, and then realising that I wanted to be involved in unlocking the power that's in brands to have a positive impact on societies, communities and the planet.

So that's really in a nutshell how I ended up in this space and the way I did that was I left, the big organisation I was working with and created my own consultancy, which was called GoodBrand. Some years later we decided to merge GoodBrand with a company I now work for, which is Anthesis. And Anthesis is the biggest dedicated sustainability advisory firm globally.

Siân Harrington [00:07:31]
 
We've been talking about sustainability for a long time now but you believe that we're at a pivotal moment. I think you refer to it as the "reality of now". Can you explain a bit about what do you mean by "reality of now" and why is this the pivotal moment?

Dean Sanders [00:07:48]

That's a great question. You can answer on so many levels, Siân. Why is this situation so critical now? Interestingly, you and I are in the UK at the moment. It's September and we're about to hit 31 degrees tomorrow. So if you want evidence of changing weather patterns that are impacted by climate change, we are living in very volatile climatic conditions.

And I think this year with forest fires raging globally we've seen a lot of citizens being very concerned because they're seeing the tangible evidence of things going wrong as a consequence of greenhouse gas emissions in the post-industrial age. To perhaps put some numbers on it, one of the areas that I get particularly engaged in is the food and agriculture sector and a lot of city dwellers, and I'm a Londoner myself, when we go out into the countryside, we look at the bucolic landscapes and think that's natural. But of course it isn't natural at all. And the food system alone has been responsible for deforesting one third of the planet's forests, and every year we lose, 15 million hectares of land for agricultural expansion to feed a growing planet. And 30% of global emissions come from our need to produce food in that way. 

Or look at it another way. Look at predictions towards 2030. It's estimated that by 2030 we're going to need 40% more fresh water than the current resources that we have. So we're living in a time where the rubber is really hitting the road. We're seeing that there is a very acute depletion of resources.

And the interesting thing is, I think from a sort of humanity point of view, is that we are the generation that has the facts and the figures. And there's still time to intervene right now to ensure that we avoid the worst possible outcomes, and perhaps more positively. We shift things in such a way that we can end up not in a sort of disaster zone when it comes to climate and resources more generally but actually to stabilise the situation and ultimately start to restore and regenerate some of the ecosystems that we've been depleting.

So, this is a unique generation because we've got the evidence, the data, the hard facts, and we still have time on our side. That's why the current decade is known as the 'Decisive Decade'. It's a decade in which we decide how we're going to go forward, and whether we're going to really take it seriously and make an impact on rebuilding, restoring and regenerating the natural capital that we've been depleting.

Siân Harrington [00:10:21]

And as another Londoner, we've just been reading about the fact we might run out of water this year, even with our local water board. It is extraordinary in a country that is so used to rain.

Dean Sanders [00:10:34] 

Absolutely shocking. I mean, one of the things I was reading, I think that was last year when we hit record temperatures here in the UK and particularly in the South East of England, is that we tend to, because we're an industrialised country in a very developed country, we tend to disregard the fact that we have some remarkably precious and unique ecosystems. 

Here in the South East of England our chalk streams are 80% of that type of ecosystem globally is in the very densely populated South East of England. And they are depleted because too much water is being pumped out and many of the utility companies are not investing in the infrastructure and fixing the leaking pipes. 

So all of these things are interconnected and there's a lot to do with the role, and I think we'll come onto that, that the private sector has to play working with the public sector and civil society and communities to come up with the kinds of solutions that we need before we lose more biodiversity and precious kind of ecosystems that will be probably impossible to restore in quite the same way. So yeah, it is really serious but on an optimistic note, there is time. We need to act, but we do have, we have time every day - we have less time- but there is still an opportunity for us I think to intervene and to avoid the worst case scenarios that are set out for 2050.

Siân Harrington [00:11:51]
 
 Yeah we want to seize that opportunity. I actually used to work on The Grocer so the food and agriculture bit is interesting to me. And I remember bringing up back in I guess the end of the nineties, early 2000s the issue of sustainability in that sector, within the magazine. You have a slightly nuanced view on this in that you are trying to move it away from sustainability to sustainable performance. So can you explain a bit about where you see those differences?

Dean Sanders [00:12:19]

It's a great question, Siân. I mean, I think the distinction between sustainability and sustainable performance is critical. I think particularly because a lot of the work that I've been doing and my colleagues do not exclusively with the private sector because, as I said before, we need to find ways of building alliances and powerful partnerships between public, private and also civil society. 

But in the work that we do for organisations more generally in specific private sector organisations is that we have to ensure that the principles of sustainability are seen through the lens of the definition of performance of an organisation. Otherwise, what tends to happen, and that has been happening for a couple of decades now, is we're banging on the door saying, you've got to do this and you've got to do that and you've got to do that. And it glances off the organisation or it gets deprioritised. It starts to look almost like a sort of a fiscal regime. It's another set of punitive measures and burdens and encumbrances on what I'm actually trying to do as a leader or a manager. 

If you look at the most material topics that affect an individual organisation and you see that there are some sustainability challenges there, what I found is often those challenges can start to become areas of opportunity and they can become areas for innovation or they can be areas of sort of, thinking about new strategies or new partnerships. And can create a source of competitive advantage. So what a lot of the work that we've been doing with organisations is to dig into that and to understand, well, how is sustainability going to affect the ability of your enterprise to continue to perform in the long run. That is what we call sustainable performance.

It is kind of revisiting sustainability as either an impediment or an opportunity and a lever for performance and for growth into the future. So, and I think what it really means is that it's important for management teams and leaders to say, well, there's a level that we need to comply with sustainability generally but there may be one or two topics that are particularly relevant and material, to use the sort of jargon, the materiality, for our sector, for our industry, and there we need to dial this up there. We need to invest, and we could actually create new sources of advantage for our organisation by focusing in, in a very forensic and a very precise way on you know, where there's going to be disruption in our particular industry.

A lot of companies still talk about, and in fact you can read sustainability reports where they talk about their sustainability performance. We think it is much more useful and powerful for those organisations to talk about their sustainable performance .

Siân Harrington [00:15:08]

I feel and we've talked quite a lot in various media, that there is a lot of greenwashing going on when we come to this agenda. It reminds me of other areas of organisations and HR like diversity and equity and inclusion. And when you've got this sort of legal compliance people are just trying to get away with the bare minimum and not putting them deeply into their organisation. Do you see that as something that see a lot? What other obstacles do you find you come across when you are talking to business?

Dean Sanders [00:15:42] 

The simple answer is yes, we do. We do see a lot of box ticking. We see a lot of compliance. And there are a number of reasons for that, really. I mean, the first is that, as I was talking earlier, the companies and the brands and the pioneers and the entrepreneurs who inspired me on my journey were the Anita Roddicks and the Ben & Jerrys and the Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia because they had the vision and the imagination to use their private sector organisation and brands to have a positive impact in the world. And that opportunity has always been there. We've always been able to do that and many organisations have been created in order to do that, but many haven't. 

And so what we're seeing now is of a lack of progress in a sort of freer market dynamic, we're seeing more regulation. So the regulation is coming from, there's European Union regulation, there's UK regulation, we're looking at Swiss regulation, the Americans are debating. Whether that's in Europe - CSRD - or the Responsible Business Initiative in Switzerland, or the Germans have a supply chain law, the Americans are debating their SEC law. So there is now a barrage of new acronyms and new legislation and that is law. So you are going to have to comply with that law. That's no longer a choice. You don't choose, well some people do choose not to comply with the law, but on the whole from a governance point of view, it's a good thing and an important thing that you are aware of those laws and you are complying with them.

But the compliance also comes from other quarters. Your customers might be saying, are you in line with our expectations as a supplier to our organisation? Or your suppliers might also be saying, what are you going to do with these raw materials? Or there might be investors who are screening you for your ESG performance or environment, social and governance performance.

So there are a lot of these different dynamics that force you to comply. But what happens there to, the point you made is that you suddenly, as an organisation, find yourself complying with everybody else's boxes and not actually having worked out what are your boxes, yeah?

So, we've come across companies where you have someone responsible for sustainability whose job ultimately becomes a compliance job. It is a form filling in and a compliance checklist job, day in, day out, gathering data, gathering metrics and evidence and proof of your impacts and what you're trying to do. And all of that energy and resource is being diverted away from asking those really fundamental questions around what is material for my business? What should we be doing? Where should we be leading? Where is sustainability going to become a real opportunity or obstacle to our sustained performance? 

And so I think that what I find fascinating and I think where we really try to help our clients is to get them out of something which really isn't working for them because they're just directing too much organisational resource into that compliance agenda and not enough into strategic thinking about where they want to go. 

So I often say, if you start this journey by thinking out of the box, you'll then actually ultimately tick the boxes anyway. If you start by ticking the boxes, you'll end by having a whole bunch of tick boxes. 

And there's a really good McKinsey report that came out, I think earlier this year that looked at leaders in organisations and their mindset as they go into sustainability. The ones that go in with a compliance agenda end up in the bottom decile of performance in organisations. The ones that go in with a growth agenda end up in the top decile. So I think your attitude and your appetite and your energy and your ambition as you go into sustainability, predetermines your outcome. Go in with a box ticking agenda. Come out with a whole bunch of boxes that have been ticked. Go in with a big thinking, visionary, strategic leading ambition, and you will perform.

 Siân Harrington [00:19:57]

Yeah. So there's this 'embedding in the strategy' as you've been saying but you touched there on, the mindset, which was something I, I did want to explore a little bit more when it came to leaders. So in the book, you talk about quite a few sort of mindsets you come against, barriers that you come up against with leaders, such as the fantasy of the status quo. How you can overcome those?

Dean Sanders [00:20:23]

Yeah, There are so many different types of organisations, so many different types of people running them. And there, are different organisations that require different characters to be at the helm. if you're in a, a business with a, very high level of exposure to safety and health in some of the extractive industries or construction industries, you do need to be very stringent on compliance. It's a, matter of life and death and so a, compliance attitude is a really critical place to start. But as I was saying earlier, it's not necessarily the place to end because you could go beyond that and you can do more.

So I don't want to generalise too much about these sort of topics because I think when you work with lots of different industries and lots of different sectors and companies, you see that there are some patterns that require different types of stewardship. And of course the old cliche is that overlaid on that is that you can have managers or leaders. And I think that this is why we subtitled the book: ESG Compliance to Leadership in the New Era.

Managers love the compliance agenda. It's a bit of a test. It's like I'm going to show you how we're going to comply and how we're going to get top ratings and top scores on all of these different frameworks that measure sustainability. And we're going to do that in a really efficient way because I as a manager, I am taking this next wave, this, next challenge of sustainability as the next way I'm going to prove my skill in managing things efficiently. 

And those leaders, I think, just think that this is, the latest thing that you've got, to do as opposed to a foundationally seismic shift in our economy and our society from unsustainable approaches to sustainable approaches.  So you end up a little bit, sort of stuck in your own managerial mindset and missing the fact that there is enormous chaos coming and disruption coming and you need to be on top of it. 

And in that sense, it's analogous to, other sort of business, examples where companies and organisations can miss, they're so busy managing their business, whether you are Kodak managing a camera business that you completely missed the disruption of your sector or Blockbuster with their video - all of these businesses that are managing their business are missing enormous discontinuities in the outside world. So that myopic introspective sector, sort of 'blinkeredness' is the biggest issue. And, one of the things that we need to do is to help individuals rediscover the excitement and the passion and the energy and the enthusiasm for being leaders. So there's a bit of a character thing there too. 

But leadership is obviously a very different process to management. And leaders are thinking about the future. They're thinking about the, wider set of impacts that their organisation have. They're thinking about what's coming down the line and how you prepare your organisation for that. And some of the sort of ways in which organisations have to report performance clearly don't work. The short-termist thinking. And indeed some managers and leaders who are thinking, well give me another two years or three years I'll clock out. I've got a nice pension pot. The longer term legacy of these assets for which I'm responsible is not really on my watch. And the reality is that that short-termist thinking and that slightly selfish thinking will destroy investor value and shareholder value over a longer period of time, over the next five or 10 years, if that organisation isn't equipped for those changes and isn't thinking about its asset base and how productive that asset base is going to be in a different economy. 

In the book, we actually reframe ESG - environment social governance - into three characteristics that we think are important traits and hallmarks of leaders in this transition: Entrepreneurship, Spirit and Grit. 

• Entrepreneurship because of that creativity, that innovation, that sort of agility, how can we think about that. 
• Spirit is because you're thinking ahead and you're thinking about your other stakeholders, not just your shareholders.
• And Grit because it is hard work. And you need to be resilient. And you need to be determined. And you need to know what you want to do. And you need to keep coming back to it. 

So, you know, I think if I were to have one message to, listeners, I think thinking about those kind of leadership qualities that always mark out leaders in any walk of life or sector of society, that those who are leading these organisations towards sustainable performance need to be really thinking through whether they have those traits, those characteristics, those skills and values in their organisations at senior levels, but throughout the business or the organisation that is going to equip them for this transition.

Siân Harrington [00:25:45]

There's been such a lot of change recently what with pandemic with the acceleration of automation and technology and now, you know, with sustainability as well. It's complex out there, isn't it? And I think we need a different type of leader to tackle all of these. So I like your, three-type approach. That's good.

We also have an audience of HR directors and they want to get involved in this conversation. We talked earlier about this sustainability officer position. I wonder what you think, you know, again, I'm going to make a parallel slightly to the diversity agenda, but we've had a number of diversity officers being appointed and yet very little movement forward. Because often they're not given the backing, they're not given the strategic role, it's not embedded coming back to that throughout the organisation.

So I just wondered, where you saw the role of the people within this – and also that whole culture piece, because you do need to, ensure that this thinking really goes down the organisation?

Dean Sanders [00:26:46] 

The question around people and, the role that the classic sort of HR functions play in this is essential from a number of perspectives. Probably one of the most increasingly urgent and important ones for organisations is how do I attract and retain the best talent?

 It's quite fascinating. And you mentioned earlier, Siân, the, implications of the pandemic and the next, generation coming through and remote working and many of these sort of workplace discontinuities and disruptions. 

 There's a sense of choice and what kind of organisation do I want to be part of? We're a certified B corporation and we find that in our, outreach to talent that is appealing. We have a clear articulated purpose and we have actually a framework which we call our Anthesis Spirit and young people who are coming out of college with the right skills, they've got all the right skills for the sort of work that we do, but they're looking for the right place. So I do think that talent is critical in this regard. 

We've also worked with client organisations who have actually located responsibility for sustainability in HR. And, sometimes you can look at that and think, hmm, what does that mean? Do they think it's about a value set or a behaviour set. But actually it, is really interesting that in some organisations, the importance of the workforce in expressing those, the facts about sustainability onto customers. If you've got a retail network or a customer service kind of organisation, you want your frontline staff who are dealing with customers to be equipped with all of the necessary information to be able to project the features and benefits and advantages of sustainability to stakeholders and to consumers, again for competitive advantage.

I think what is critical if we want to get to sustainable performance is for an organisation to ask the right questions about where primary accountability and responsibility for sustainable performance should sit. And typically that will be, we think, in more commercial roles. And it is a C-suite agenda. The days of pushing this down into a public relations department or, you know, some other sort of sub unit are over. 

We're seeing more and more chief purpose officers, chief impact officers. I just met one earlier this week for a large international cosmetics firm. And her role is to combine the positive impact that her organisation is having with the commercial performance of the organisation.

So I think these hybrids are really interesting and I think we're going to see more and more of that. But just saying you are responsible for sustainability and you are responsible performance. That isn't going to cut it anymore. It's about integration. 

And actually for chief people officer profiles, they then need to be taking that to your point, I think that's absolutely right, making sure that the organisation is enabled and equipped with the skills, the knowledge, the values that they need to make sustainability, everyone sustainable performance, everyone's ambition, objective, KPI.

Siân Harrington [00:30:26]
 
About people leading the way, are there any businesses that you are happy to mention that you think have been particularly impressive? Anything in particular they're doing? 

 Dean Sanders [00:30:36]

I've had the great privilege of working together with the senior leaders at the Nespresso coffee business. And what I've been really interested in as I've observed their journey is how they have taken a very holistic approach to the entirety of their value chain, realising that, and actually kind of hard wiring it in the performance of their business. Their business thrives on the availability of the highest quality coffees in the world, which are at risk from the impact of climate change.

 We've quite a lot of parts of the coffee producing belt that will simply be too hot or too humid to sustain the kind of high end coffee, Arabica coffees, that businesses like Nespresso need, and so you have to act, you have to intervene. And they've been driving an enormous transition to regenerative agriculture, to agroforestry, planted 6 million trees.

And under the leadership of I think, you know, two very impressive leaders, Guillaume Le Cunff, who's the CEO there, but also Jérôme Perez, who's the head of sustainability globally: these are people who have proven that they can perform in other businesses and they've moved into, sustainable performance leadership in that organisation. The business has grown. The business has done very, very well and really I would recommend, your listeners to have a look at what they're doing. It's called the Positive Cup.  And I know many people will say, well, what about the capsules? And I won't go into a lot of detail, but some amazing innovation around new capsules that are home compostable or made of paper. 

You see that there are lots of things you need to keep doing. You need to be agile, you need to be entrepreneurial. You need to be innovative. You need to keep improving all the time. So, yeah, have a look at Nespresso. mentioned the ones that inspired me, Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's, but I think we need to be looking at large organisations, multinational organisations with a big footprint when we look for those kind of examples of impact at scale.

Siân Harrington [00:32:45] 

Yeah, I totally agree because it is easy to look at those smaller entrepreneurial companies but not see how you can, do that at scale, as you said. A great example and also a reminder that we shouldn't shoot everyone down because they can't do everything at once, because I think we tend to go, oh, you have to be 100%. So you mentioned the capsules there, but you know, you've got to start on that journey and take it bit at a time. I think that's a really good example of that. And new technologies will come in place and you'll be able to make more and more stuff that's sustainable. 

So this is a subject you are very optimistic about, which I'm pleased to see, and it's one that I've also been passionate about for a long, long time. The only issue I always see is as soon as difficulties come, as soon as we have financial problems. At the moment, we've got a lot of populism. Climate scepticism is stronger than it used to be. I can get a bit negative at times and think, are we really moving forward given that there is this almost smoking gun moment and people need to do it. So, allay my fears. Tell me why we should be optimistic. You've done a great example there of one company. Why should we be optimistic generally about the way this is going?

Dean Sanders [00:34:04] 

I think first of all we've always got to be careful with optimism that it's not wishful thinking or naivety.  But I think, there's a place for what I describe as narratives of hope. I think humans are, they survive day one because of their fear instincts but they're all of us, it's inbuilt into us, we want to get to day two. We want these narratives of hope and meaning. one of the parts of the business that I'm responsible for is connecting communications and narratives with truth and rigour and scientific substance. 

Another company that I've been really intrigued by and interested and inspired by is a business called Made of Air in Berlin, which is a carbon capture business. So they literally, they sequester the carbon back out of the atmosphere and they turn it into products and they capture it in hard materials. So they're making dashboards for BMWs and for Audis. They're making luxury German kitchens out of captured carbon. And when they went to raise, I think they were, you know, early stage and they went, when they were looking for VC money, the VCs weren't going to them because they were sustainable, they were going to them because they were profitable and they were interesting and they were a growth business. 

So I'm really interested in these kind of innovators who are coming into this space and saying, we can turn this into an opportunity. This is an incredibly fertile time in history to create new solutions, to innovate, create new enterprises that are going to solve the problems of the previous. So that is really what makes me most optimistic is I, I work with these people. I see them and I see their technologies. I see their businesses scaling. I see them getting investment. Some of it's a little bit like the bamboo economy where it's all growing underground and then suddenly it will shoot up and the public will become more aware of it. But, I do think it's incumbent on organisations to get those narratives out there to excite, to excite the population.  

So all of this stuff is happening. It's a time of radical change in transformation. There's a lot to be excited about. It needs to happen quickly. Because we're in this decisive decade, as we said right at the beginning of our conversation.

Siân Harrington [00:36:25]

You've obviously learned so much about this over your career. How has it actually impacted your own behaviour, as a leader first perhaps in your business context, and then more as a person?

Dean Sanders [00:36:38] 

Yeah, it's a, a great question, Siân. I think that one thing that, you know, when you've got 30 odd years’ experience under your belt, as I have, you realise that focus on the material topics is the most important. We talked about materiality and relevance. There's a lot to be done. You will have the biggest impact as an advisor and as a guide if you focus in on the, main things which is why my professional focus has moved more and more towards the food sector and the agricultural sector because there's a big job to be done.

It's interesting that you spend so much time, don't you, in your professional roles. It's how that can negatively or positively shape you as a human. The thing which I would like to think that I have developed in, but I'd, like others to be able to judge that is that joy of being a consultant or an advisor or a guide is the joy of serving. 

The way you view fellow citizens is that you put yourself at their service. And I think that that public spiritedness, I'm not in any way making any great claims about that right at the beginning of that journey, but I do think that there is something at the heart of being an advisor and a guide that is about taking satisfaction and joy in serving other people to get to their objectives.

Siân Harrington [00:37:59] 

Great. Well, we've gone through a lot of great information there. Can you sum up in a way for people who might be really inspired by this, but it is daunting, what are the first three steps that our listeners can take, sort of actionable steps to move beyond that tick box compliance and start really thinking about sustainable performance and putting some practical actions in place?

Dean Sanders [00:38:24] 

I love that sort of landing in the practicality, Siân. I would say there's some higher level things and there are some sort of slightly more operational things. One thing which is really important, I found helpful for me and I think for many of our clients, is to start out on the process of defining and articulating purpose. And in a sense, in two ways. 

Firstly, your own purpose. What it is you are doing, what are you doing with who you are, with your own personal professional resources and trying to set up where you are going with your life and your professional career.

The second part of that is then what is the organisational purpose? And there's a lot of purpose wash, and there's a lot of very badly written and inaccurate kind of constructions and confusion. What's a purpose? What's a mission? What's a vision? But if you can get to some sort of really a set of words that sets out what I sometimes call the world value proposition. 

You know, what is your organisational proposition to the world? Why do we need you? Why do you exist? What are you all about? Why should you be able to use environmental resources for the products and services that you are creating? So I think getting clear on purpose is important. 

The second thing is discern the weed from the chaff in the sense that you're going to have a dashboard of a million KPIs that you've got to comply with, as we said, but there are one or two things there where there are nuggets of gold that, if you put energy, effort and resource into those, you are going to be able to find new growth opportunities, new innovation opportunities, new forms of strategic advantage. Particularly, if you can make them relevant for your current assets. How can you reframe and rethink?

So I think really personal purpose, organisational purpose and focus on the material relevant issues where you can make a difference to the world and indeed to the sustainable performance of your organisation.

Siân Harrington [00:40:29] 

That was Dean Sanders on sustainable performance. For me, a key issue in this is that the sustainability agenda just isn't working because we are focusing way too much on compliance, doing the bare minimum we need to hit the plethora of regulations already here or coming our way.

Instead, we need to move away from business as usual and seize the moment now to build total value systems for all stakeholders before it's too late. Don't run away from those elephants, but canoe with them. I couldn't include everything from our discussion in this episode, so I recommend reading Dean and Stuart's book, The Adventure of Sustainable Performance: Beyond ESG Compliance to Leadership in the New Era, where you can find out more about the three parts of the journey to achieving real value. what they call the charge, the campfire, and the re approach. I like that we ended with the narratives of hope. And so I hope you come away from this episode inspired and fired up to take the first steps that Dean outlined to tackle this urgent issue.

So thank you so much for listening this week. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow me on LinkedIn at Sean Harrington, the People Space. And if you want more insights and resources on the future of work and sustainability, check out the people space.com. This episode was produced by Nigel Pritchard, and you've been listening to Work's not Working... Let's Fix It! Goodbye.