3.5 Sustainable development

At the start of the course, we introduced hybrid ways of working: a contextual framework which suggests:

1. You and how you work need to be mindful of the key stakeholders within your environment and their needs in relation to organisational development.
2. You need to understand organisational needs, the context, connections, and requirements for key areas of focus and how these relate to the needs of your stakeholders.
3. You need to consider your ways of working for the wellbeing of future generations.

The framework draws on the Triple Bottom Line (Elkington, 1994), and has been designed to assist with ensuring that wellbeing is an integral part of developing your organisation’s approach to sustainability, by considering the three pillars of sustainability: Social/People, Environmental/Planet, and Economic/Profit. They are of equal importance.

Figure 12: Three pillars of sustainability

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Image shows a Venn diagram. The top circle is titled ‘People/Social’ and contains the text: Social variables dealing with community, education, equity, social resources, health, wellbeing and quality of life. The lower left circle is titled ‘Planet/Environmental’ and contains the text: Environmental variables relating to natural resources, water & air quality, energy conservation & land use. The lower right circle is titled ‘Profit/Economic’ and contains the text: Economic variables dealing with the bottom line & cash flow. The section where the Economic and Environmental circle overlap is titled ‘Viable’. The section where the Environmental and Social circles overlap is titled ‘Bearable’. The section where the Social and Economic sections overlap is titled ‘Equitable’. The centre section where all three circles overlap is titled ’Sustainable’.

Figure 12: Three pillars of sustainability

People/Social – Organisations ensure responsible, ethical, and fair treatment of employees, stakeholders, and the community it operates in.

Planet/Environmental – Promoting activities that lead to the reduction of negative impact on the environment, both within the organisation and its supply chain.

Profit/Economic – An organisation needs to be profitable in order to operate.

In the video Stephen Peake explains the triple bottom line for sustainability. As you watch consider how it might assist you in embedding three pillars of sustainability within your organisation.

Download this video clip.Video player: hyb_1_2022_sep110_triple_bottom_line_stephen_peak.mp4

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Transcript

STEPHEN PEAKE

And I think what this triple bottom line, as it used to be called-- and we’d call it sustainability or regenerative thinking. The triple bottom line is a lovely idea of thinking about what was used to be called the three pillars of sustainability. So those three pillars are the social, the economic, and the environmental dimensions of sustainability. And John Elkington, a number of years ago now-- it must be more than 20. He just translated that with a diagram.

Instead of talking about the three pillars, he said, it’s all about people, planet, and profit, the three Ps. And he called that the triple bottom line. And the beauty about it, as a metaphor, was that business was used to thinking about the bottom line. It can’t affect the bottom line.

But he said, well, the line, it’s not one line. It’s three lines. And so that was the beauty of the triple bottom line. Now what it means for us is that instead of just playing with these ideas in an intellectual way, because we’re very good at that. That’s what we do, right?

We are under pressure to go one step further now and say, just stop thinking about it. And what are you going to do? And how are you going to act? And what are your values going to become? And can you lead the rest of us by adopting different values and different behaviours? And can you show us that it can be done?

So we’re like little experiments waiting to happen. And it’s up to us in the higher education sector to choose, are we going to be brave enough to try something, something quite, because we’ve not got a lot of time. And we need something quite radical.

And if we can’t do it, well, why would you look at anybody else in the private or the third sector and think, well, they can do it? So we’re uniquely placed. And I think I speak for almost all my colleagues who will ever think about this would say, yes, we want to do something bold and radical. And we want to turn this education about sustainability into education as sustainability, so education and sustainability are the same thing. That’s what we’re doing.

My favourite example of change is walking and cycling. Now, I know that that might not seem terribly modern. It’s not that modern. We’ve been walking a long time. And bicycles have been around for a couple of centuries a bit more.

But actually, if you can encourage people to walk and cycle a bit more, either a household level, individual, or across the organisation, you’re hitting so many things all at once. You’re not just reducing emissions, but you’re creating a healthier mental approach in the people that are doing the walking and cycling, providing they’re not too stressed about it. And they’re getting physically healthier. And just the whole thing is a virtual circle.

So I would say that whatever sustainability question you’ve got, almost certainly, the bicycle is the answer. I hope in the future that we stop talking about this word sustainability as if it’s something really exotic and that it just-- maybe that we stop talking about it. And maybe we don’t have to mention a new technical vocabulary because we’re doing something different. But we just talk about wellbeing or health or how are we or what kind of life are you leading. And we kind of understand that there are some principles and some values associated with that.

And so if we’re still talking about sustainability in 20, 30 years from now in the way we do today, then we probably haven’t made much progress. So it has to just become part of the furniture. And we just have different expectations about how we want to live, work, travel, how we want to be, what our relationship is with objects, what our relationship is with money, what our relationship is with the future.

And that is-- that’s a cultural thing. So it’s a cultural, the future of sustainability is a cultural phenomenon that we haven’t experienced yet. So it’s hard to kind of show you or take you on a tour. But it will happen just the same as it would be if I took you in a time machine and said, let’s go backwards to Victorian times. And I’ll let you understand and feel what it was like to be a Victorian.

I can do that. I can do that through television. I can do that through drama. But I can’t yet do it for the future. But we will. We will get there. And it will feel different.

End transcript

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Developing a sustainable organisation may require decisions on profit margins. Committing to sustainable business practices requires change, and demonstrating the ‘environmental, social and governance’ (ESG) metrics are as equally important as the financial data, for measuring the success of organisations.

Many HEIs belong to The Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] , which provides numerous resources, including the Higher Education Supply Chain Emissions (HESCET) Tool for helping with procurement decisions.

The triple bottom line: what it is & why it’s important article from the Harvard Business School Online explains what organisations need to consider for measuring their social and environmental impact.