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Making Sustainability Matter
How to Make Materiality Drive Profit, Strategy and Communications
Dwayne Baraka
Email: dwayne.baraka@valuecsr.com
Tel: +44 75 9011 6051
Abstract
MATERIALITY IS A SUSTAINABILITY LYNCH-PIN that binds strategy, the business case and effective reporting together in a way that will result in profitable and effective sustainability initiatives. Many organisations believe that sustainability is important for their success and are committed to becoming more sustainable. But they don’t always know how to prioritise action for sustainability, how to get quick wins or how to effectively communicate sustainability programmes to their stakeholders. A well thought out and implemented materiality process can assist organisations achieve all of those things, although getting ‘quick’ wins will require quite a bit of planning and some sustained hard work. Making Sustainability Matter is needed because too many organisations:
- waste resources on sustainability programmes that are not strategically aligned to the organisation,
- do not have optimal returns on sustainability investments,
- do not meet the needs of stakeholders, or
- have programmes that cannot be communicated effectively to generate trust and give transparency that matters.
This guide, penned by business strategy expert Dwayne Baraka, will give readers the tools they need to effectively integrate sustainability into their organisation.
About the Author
DWAYNE BARAKA is a career thinker, speaker, facilitator and sustainability expert. Dwayne is committed to monetising ‘soft’ sustainability disciplines and believes that there are virtually no companies that cannot make their business more profitable through engaging with their most material sustainability issues. As a sustainability professional, he has worked on the corporate strategy of several of the FTSE 100 and many more besides, including tech companies, housing associations, construction companies and others. He has worked in Australia, Bahrain, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, France, Ireland, Latvia, Lebanon, Norway, UAE, USA and UK. He’s written award-winning articles on sustainability and has been Editor of the Encyclopaedia of Corporate Social Responsibility since 2010. He recently founded valuecsr, a sustainability consultancy focused on executive training, materiality and the business case for sustainability within organisations.
Author Note and Acknowledgements
I WOULD HAVE LIKED TO CALL THIS BOOK ‘Sustainability Relevance’. Relevance is useful as a word because it is clear and looks more like the outputs from the process I’m about to lay out for finding the most relevant sustainability issues. And it also avoids a word that has other meanings in an organisational context, ‘materiality’. The use of that word in the context of sustainability has added to suspicion that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is non-core to business and destroys value. That perception is highly problematic for anyone trying to embed relevant sustainability issues into business process and thinking.
However, the term ‘materiality’ seems settled among sustainability professionals, and it’s more important to improve practice in this area than it is to obsess about nomenclature. I encourage readers to use the word ‘relevance’ for an internal audience, at least interspersed with use of the ‘m’ word.
It is my hope that by the end of this book that you will be convinced that a thorough and commercially focused materiality process can set sustainability firmly at the centre of organisational success. My goal is to help make sustainability more like ‘just good business’. You might even come to agree with me that materiality is the only sensible basis for organisations to allocate resources for sustainability. Of the 5 phases identified, the main focus is deliberately on Scan and Prioritise, while Embed, Manage and Tell are given less focus. For each of the last three parts of the framework, there are some materiality-specific tips, but they are challenges generic to sustainability and they are not covered in depth. The reader should look to other sources (including publications in this series) for additional help.
Thanks to anyone who has ever engaged with me on materiality. Much of what I am now passing on is, in part, yours. Thanks for your wisdom and generosity.
Speaking of which, many thanks to each of the following people who played a direct role in this guide:
- Elaine Cohen
- Eileen Donnelly
- Ian Gearing
- David Grayson
- Rowland Hill
- Thomas Odenwald
- Rachel Parihk
A more brilliant panel of sustainability advisers and reviewers has not been assembled, and it is something of a dream to have their comments on, and input to, this work.
On a final note:
This book is dedicated to Lis and Lincoln, without whose wisdom and generosity this book would not have been possible.
Who This Book Is For
THIS BOOK IS RELEVANT PRIMARILY for sustainability professionals who are implementing a materiality process.
More broadly, it is of interest to a range of professionals and other stakeholders who have a professional, personal or academic interest in the relevance of sustainability to particular organisations – its ‘materiality’.
The table below offers some guidance for the following audiences.
| If you are: | This book will help you: |
|
| A sustainability professional | Embed sustainability into business as usual, and begin the journey of calculating the business case for sustainability |
|
| An executive | Understand a process for integrating sustainability into organisational strategy, performance and communications |
|
| Responsible for sustainability Reporting | To allocate sustainability resources for better reporting and more effective communication with stakeholders |
|
| An investor | Understand a business-focused process for identifying material sustainability issues |
|
| Tasked with ensuring G4 compliance | Report materiality processes effectively and to the level required to achieve G4 compliance |
|
Navigating this book
The book contains three main types of ‘call-out’ boxes.
'Top Tips’ (example right), contains condensed observations and reminders of the most important things to consider in certain areas.
Top Tips
- ✓ Observations
- ✓ Reminders
'Tips for Advanced Companies’ (example below), is meant for more sophisticated readers, or readers who are re-visiting the guide after imple...
