Management Systems for Sustainability

How to Connect Strategy and Action

Phil Cumming

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351275026
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

To deliver on your sustainability ambitions, you need an effective management system. Delivery and results, after all, are what sets leading sustainable businesses apart.

Supplementing your existing management arrangements with a management systems approach can play a crucial part in helping to implement more sustainable ways of working. It will help your colleagues understand what sustainability means and how it applies to their role. It will strengthen the link between strategy and action and provide the framework for the various elements of your sustainability strategy to happen.

In this short guide, Phil Cumming introduces you to management systems thinking and concepts and sets out clear and practical steps to help you be more formalized and systematic about how and when you do things. This book will help you deliver on your sustainability ambitions – without needing to follow a single management system standard!

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

Setting the scene

SO YOU HAVE DEVELOPED an ambitious sustainability vision and strategy and you now need to make this a reality, or perhaps you have lots of interesting initiatives happening on the ground and are struggling to make the link between the two?

Sustainability programmes should not sit apart from the core of how the business is run. They need to be as integrated into the organisation as much as possible. Whilst people are of course key to making things happen, ‘hearts and minds’ alone are unlikely to deliver your sustainability goals.

Adopting a management systems approach by tapping into and supplementing existing management and governance arrangements will help you to strengthen the link between your sustainability strategy and action. It will support you in implementing more sustainable ways of working and, assuming that there is a positive enabling culture in the organisation, reinforce engagement efforts by making sustainability more relevant to the very individuals you are reaching out to.

The problem is that in many instances as soon as you mention ‘management systems’ to people their eyes do tend to glaze over. This might be driven through a perception that they are all to do with standards or a view that they are just too overly bureaucratic and technical and only applicable to larger businesses. Neither view is necessarily the case, although granted the language that standards use can get in the way and confuse things for those who aren’t too familiar with it.

A number of management system or framework standards relevant to sustainability have emerged in recent years. The ones of particular note are:

• BS 8900-1:2013 and BS 8900-2:2013: Managing sustainable development of organizations¹ (recently revised and now includes a framework for assessment²);
• BS ISO 20121:2012: Event sustainability management systems – Requirements with guidance for use³ (world’s first international and certifiable sustainability management system standard – and the approach could be applied to any organisation);
• BS ISO 26000:2010: Guidance on social responsibility⁴ (which is quite a heavy read and whilst it is technically not a sustainability standard, it is of some use);
• SIGMA Guidelines⁵ (over ten years old but still an incredibly useful resource); and
• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G4 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines⁶ (a useful resource even you don’t intend to actually produce a sustainability report).

You can of course also embed sustainability considerations into more traditional management system standards, such as quality management (e.g. ISO 9001⁷) and environmental management (e.g. ISO 14001⁸, although still focusing on the environment the forthcoming revised version of the standard should be much improved and strengthened⁹).

Although you might wish to meet and be independently certified or assessed to one of these standards (where that possibility exists) these should really be secondary considerations. Whilst they do have their place, it is possible to adopt a management systems approach without ever having to follow a single standard.

An earlier DōShort, Making the Most of Standards – The Sustainability Professional’s Guide¹⁰ provides an insight into the world of sustainability standards. This DōShort provides an introduction to management systems thinking and concepts to help you more effectively deliver on your sustainability ambitions, from a non-standards viewpoint.

Attempts have been made to simplify terminology used in this Short as much as possible. The terms vision, strategy, plan, policy and process are used throughout. Many organisations will have their own definitions for each of these terms, but for the purposes of this Short they are defined as follows:

Vision	A short, succinct and inspiring forward-looking statement of what an organisation intends to become or achieve at some point in the future. It sets out the future aspirations without saying the why or the how.
Strategy	A high-level document which sets out where you are, what you want to do and where you want to end up. A strategy does not specifically set out how you will achieve this, and instead focuses more on the why – and generally assumes you will be successful. Strategies can exist at different levels of a business – it could be corporate-wide, be specific to a department or team, be operationally focused or specific to a theme (e.g. climate change).
Plan	A plan focuses on the how! For example, it sets out the steps by which you intend to deliver all or aspects of a strategy. It should generally include any interdependencies or assumptions, roles and responsibilities, resource needs, issues and risks, and a clear programme of actions.
Policy	A policy is a clear, concise statement that is endorsed by top management and lays down the rules for something to ensure consistency and compliance with a requirement driven by a strategy and/or plan.
Process	A specified way of carrying out an activity or task that may or may not be documented. Processes may be supported by detailed written procedures or instructions or by other implementation tools. They should generally relate to policies and set out how a policy or aspects of a policy should be implemented.

So what is a management system?

Adopting a management systems approach will help you in being more formalised and systematic in how and when you do things.

A management system provides the means by which your organisation can formalise, document and improve its management practices. It facilitates the delivery of continuous improvement in overall business performance, providing the means for various things (or interventions) to happen. It is not necessarily something you see – it is part of the very fabric of the organisation and what makes it tick.

All businesses will have some form of a management system even if they do not think of it in these terms. They will have policies and processes in place (even if they are not formalised or written down), which amongst other things, will seek to set down rules around how goods and services are procured, how people are hired, how data are collected and managed, or how things are communicated. The management system is essentially the ‘sum of all these parts’. How rigorous a particular business is ‘directed or controlled’ will vary greatly among organisations.

In effect, a good management system should go hand in hand with good organisational governance – they are not mutually exclusive concepts. Many organisations fall down here. They may well have management processes which consider sustainability matters but often have no or limited governance arrangements in place. An important question to answer therefore is how you should best integrate sustainability into key management processes and governance structures of your organisation to ensure effective management oversight and organisational performance. Effective management and governance should mean that you are more likely to achieve your sustainability goals.

The benefits of integrating sustainability into your organisation through a management systems approach include:

• Establishing a business-wide approach to managing sustainability performance through improved top management ownership and better decision-making;
• Establishing clear roles and responsibilities for sustainability matters;
• Enhancing stakeholder engagement, support and partnerships working;
• Preventing duplicated efforts and overlooking key sustainability issues;
• Developing the support of sustainability strategies and plans that are consistent with the needs of the business (i.e. are not competing or contradictory);
• Better planning and allocation of resources;
• More effective communication of sustainability requirements and achievements;
• Facilitating coordinated solutions to sustainability issues identified in different areas of the business; and
• More effective and efficient internal and external assurance and strategic review.

Core principles and structure of this DōShort

You may have heard the phrase Plan Do Check Act (PDCA). Most management system standards are modelled on this concept – known as the Deming Cycle – that originates from the 1950s.¹¹ This is predicated on modifying a process through continuous feedback that results in an improved and more efficient process over time. The PDCA cycle can be summarised as:

• Plan: identifying your vision or goals and developing a strategy;
• Do: implementing the plan to deliver your strategy and goals;
• Check: monitoring your outcomes and reviewing progress and achievements or problems and areas for improvement; and
• Act: acting on the learning derived from the entire process to adjust your goals, change approaches or revise your entire strategy.

The PDCA cycle is not particularly intuitive and some people do struggle with the concept. This is partly because it implies that your approach to developing a management system will always be sequential. In real life, particularly where you have an established business, this will rarely be the case. In reality, you will be doing things out of sequence, often concurrently with other things and in most cases will be continually reviewing and changing things.

The other essential ingredients of any management systems approach is that top management (highest level of management in the organisation) must retain overall ownership and accountability and that key stakeholders are continually engaged and able to feedback their views and thoughts.

In a sustainability context, the key success factors for adopting a management systems approach means that your organisation has:

• Defined a long-term commitment to sustainability, with a clear vision and goals, and associated programme which has the support of its top management and its key stakeholders;
• Determined the steps by which progress towards goals will be achieved;
• Established systems, controls and assurance mechanisms to implement those steps; and
• Demonstrated progress and improved its overall sustainability performance.

This DōShort aims to help you achieve these key success factors by taking you through each of the following five chapters. Although again this structure implies that the process is sequential, this is not necessarily the case at all. You can dip in and out as is relevant to your circumstances and many things can be done in parallel or out of sequence and the process is iterative. The process should also work for any business, however small or large.

The overall intention of adopting this approach is to help you communicate and build support with peers and senior management, put in place...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The'Brilliant Basics'
• 3 All in the Planning
• 4 Walking the Talk
• 5 Is Everything up to Scratch?
• 6 Practice Makes Perfect
• 7 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
• Notes