A sustainable future is now in reach

The first article I wrote for The Guardian in 1978 explored market opportunities created by the evolving environmental agenda for business. A somewhat unsettling memory, given that 36 years on we are now once again exploring the market opportunities implicit in the transformational change agenda.

So do we just go in circles, chasing our tails?

Sometimes we do, no question. Truly novel ideas are rare; rebranding is common. But stand far enough back from the processes of change and you will see spiraling. Things go around, but they also progress. Through successive economic, social and political cycles, our agenda has mutated and evolved. Preservation and wildlife conservation morph into environmentalism and then into sustainability. What was once a pretty edgy, marginal set of concerns (“change the system!”) is now pushing into the economic mainstream – with a growing number of entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs and other business leaders calling for system change.

This thought came to mind when I recently keynoted an event in Verbier, Switzerland, where plans are afoot to compete with the World Economic Forum by creating the “Davos of Sustainability”. Alongside André Schneider, who ran WEF’s Davos event for years, I argued that it would be better not to mimic the WEF - not least because they are so well entrenched in key areas.

Instead, we suggested, focus on something distinctive, something new. My proposal: concentrate on what can be achieved in the decade from 2015 to 2025 and how we can make politics and economics work for a sustainable future.

As confidence in the old world order erodes, those with an eye to the future are looking for radically different solutions. A growing number of business leaders are beginning to notice innovations they had previously ignored. They are spurred by the sort of breakthrough innovation that saw electric car company, Tesla, see a tenfold increase in stock valuation in the last four years, while General Motors value remained the same.

They’re also considering new ways to perform not only against today’s measures of success but also against tomorrow’s bottom line – moving beyond the notion of the triple bottom line. Organisations such as Trucost are now helping a growing spectrum of companies come to grips with the new agenda, as they have done with Puma and its parent company Kering.

This is the challenge that former Puma CEO and environmental profit and loss pioneer Jochen Zeitz and I spotlight in a new book. Our conclusion: it’s time to co-evolve a shared vision of a radically improved future, and to work out new ways to measure and incentivise progress.

Although it is still emergent, some features of tomorrow’s bottom line are clear. It will place a higher value on ambition and stretch targets. Its evolution will be powered by radically greater market transparency. It will track new forms of capital and value, using numbers and algorithms that would seem alien to many of today’s financial analysts and CFOs. It will be integrated in new ways, linking to metrics on the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities, and ecosystems. It will favour businesses that learn from nature and play into the evolving circular economy.

Ultimately, too, true system change will require the transformation of capitalism’s master discipline, economics. And there are early signs of progress. Take the news that support for the concept of gross domestic product (GDP) is fading in, of all places, China. Spurred by a Beijing directive, 70 smaller Chinese cities and regions are dropping GDP as a performance metric for government officials. “Using GDP as the main assessment method has caused a lot of problems, like unequal income distribution, problems with the social welfare system and environmental costs,” explained Xie Yaxuan, head of macroeconomic analysis at China Merchants Securities in Shenzhen.

The fabled butterfly effect is usually thought of in negative terms, with tiny wing-beats triggering devastation a world away. But history is full of positive examples, too. And to paraphrase the sci-fi author William Gibson, a better future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed, yet.

Transformational change is out there – and building. As you might expect, it is building more powerfully bottom-up than top-down, and is more often pushing outside-in than inside-out. That makes the relevant trends harder to spot for busy, distracted leaders, but the “redefining prosperity” community can help us all to look and spiral forward, joining up tomorrow’s dots.

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John Elkington is co-founder and executive chairman of Volans. He also co-founded SustainAbility and Environmental Data Services (Ends). His latest book, The Breakthrough Challenge, is co-authored with Jochen Zeitz and is published by Jossey-Bass this month. He tweets as @volansjohn.

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