Shared Value is about meeting the needs of your business, community, or community-serving organization by improving sustainability performance and collaborating with others to co-create business profit and social value.

Why do or don’t people live sustainably?  I’ve researched this issue over the course of my professional career and I have found 5 main interrelated challenges to achieving a sustainable society.

1.       Governmental Policy

2.       Accountability of Financial and Investment Institutions

3.       Corporate Governance

4.       Citizen Education on Sustainability

5.       Collaboration across Sectors

But, why are things the way they are?  And, what is required to change entrenched mindsets and habits to new ways of thinking and doing that transform these challenges into opportunities? 

The challenges we face in achieving sustainability didn’t just create themselves.  In large part, they are symptoms of Industrial Age design for wealth creation:  vertical business structures with hierarchical, command and control systems that operate from rigid strategic plans that tend to separate thinking from doing.  This model is not well suited to address the multidimensional nature of sustainability challenges and opportunities that require networked collaboration framed by shared ownership, accountability based on trust, connected thinking and doing, linked and leveraged resources, and flexible plans that change with circumstances. 

To a degree, the situation has begun to solve itself.  The old economy is giving way to the Innovation Economy where networked collaboration drives wealth creation by capitalizing on different value lenses, promoting free competition of ideas, and linking and leveraging assets to increase efficacy of planning and action to multiply impact.  In this newly realized Age of Interdependence innovation can come from anywhere. 

In the 21^st century, the response to sustainability challenges and opportunities must unfold within this emerging formative field of collaborative thinking and networked doing and seek solutions outside the confines of old mindsets and habits.  The preferred mindset is one that transforms pressing societal needs into true business opportunities.  The aim is to co-create business profit and social value over the short-and long-terms and by doing so create a culture of innovation. 

To meet this opportunity I developed a simple, but comprehensive, three-point sustainability framework guided by sustainability principles developed by The Natural Step and performance indicators developed by Ceres as a vehicle for an organization to steer according to its unique mix of assets, needs and vision.

Three-Point Sustainability Framework

I focus my work in four service streams.  My approach builds the internal capacity of your organization to continue success once my job is done. 

v  Sustainability Assessment

v  Roadmap to Sustainability

v  Collaborative Networks

v  Sustainable Tourism