Don’t look back in 20 years and wish you’d done more

Sustainability is such a vast globally interconnected challenge that rarely is there any choice other than to be ultra clear on the best use of your time and energy. As an individual or a whole organisation. That means clarity on the problem. And clarity on your spheres of influence to tackle the problem. Nowhere is that need more acute than for professional services firms.

Professional services firms exist at the centre of companies, industries, and governments. They exist across a wide spectrum from consulting and technology through to law and financial services. Their services might resemble developing strategy, implementing new technology, managing business processes, allocating investment, or providing legal assistance.

That central position is a platform. An enormous sphere of influence over clients, partner organisations, and entire systems. But services firms remain too conservative. Strong demand for professional services even in a tougher 2024 market means that even the least ambitious can be commercially successful for now. Even in providing sustainability-focused services. But the global context is screaming out to those who do have ambition…

To address the climate and sustainability emergency a new system has to emerge. But we must leverage our existing systems to get there.

That new sustainable system will need services firms to use their positions of influence to figure out how to make sustainability work: for the planet, people, and their clients’ commercial success. Across all environmental, social, and economic challenges. In doing so, services firms can help set the new standards – as part of the critical mass that triggers the systemic change we need – that pulls clients, partners, and entire ecosystems into alignment with trajectories that meet the Paris Agreement and 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals.

There are two primary ways to go about this, at two ends of a spectrum: embedding sustainability, and the proverbial critical mass approach.

Critical mass and systems change

Many services firms will tell you that their clients simply don’t want to bother with sustainability – whether that’s engaging their services deliberately to address sustainability, or in ingraining sustainability targets and tools into existing efforts. Truly embedding sustainability is a way to get around this, and I’ll touch on that later. But first, services firms should identify the “coalition of the willing”. Who are the willing clients and partner firms that share a desire to push the bar forward and be part of the critical mass? What existing coalitions can you tap into and create systemic effects? Services firms are frequently leading members of major global sustainability coalitions whether the World Economic Forum, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, or the UN Global Compact. Some services firms are the direct consultants to these coalitions and their initiatives.  Most all services firms have major partnership ecosystem – covering parts of their value chain from specialist consulting, technology giants, or outsourcing capacity partners.

Embedding sustainability

For clients less willing to intentionally go after distinct sustainability initiatives, embedding sustainability can itself have a systems-changing effect. For a services firm to reach a point where every consulting, technology, or managed service is aligned naturally to various sustainability roadmaps – showing clients that is the most commercial and conscientious way to operate moving forward – the more that successful approach will spread and become the norm.

To achieve that level of embedded sustainability, services firms need to quantify their scale and materiality.

Last year I covered a variety of leading approaches to embedding sustainability in services teams, clients, and ecosystems. Little has happened since to my eyes. While much of the thinking and clarity has been done in sustainability services, and rightly a large amount of time and energy is now aimed at putting into practice strategy, tech, and processes… the lack of a voice in the market calling for systemic change speaks volumes.

Services firms must be clear and transparent about where sustainability is intentional, embedded, or consequential (ie a good sustainable outcome happens by accident). They must quantify and measure these elements. But they must also focus on their most material spheres of influence. To use an embellished example: procurement consultants should be focused on exposing and removing modern slavery from supply chains before they worry about an extra 5% recyclability for their packaging. Check out this previous take on sustainability spheres of influence.

Where do you see yourself in 20 years?

Professional services firms will be an undoubted part of the sustainability shift – regardless of their ambition. But when systemic change is triggered, whether by client demand, public pressure, or regulation, there will be a lot of strategy, technology, and business management work to do. Who do you think clients will ask to help them with that? Just maybe it will be the services firm that was part of the systems change.

Services firms will make money from sustainability whether they ignore this message or not. Just please don’t look back in 20 years’ time when you’re being pulled along by systemic change and regret that you could have done more to create that new world.