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Augu

sto

Cugi

notti Ten year-old kids in Copenhagen

during COP15 explored a scenario where their family lived in a house with a big garden. Surrounding both was an invisible bubble that prevented everything but the energy of the sun from coming in and out. Would their families be able to live in such a place? What would happen?

Strategic Sustainable Development

How can we live

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It didn’t take long for them to realize that taking the garbage

out would not simply make it disappear and tending to their garden would be very important if they wanted to have vegetables to eat. Today’s globalized world, the size of our population and how we have been dealing with natural resources bring us very close to the scenario those kids explored. We all live in that house and our society has the same question: how can we live together in such a place?If your organization is not yet talking about sustainability, it certainly will. A recent Harvard Business Review points out that it stands as one of the megatrends that have been shaping and impacting the way we will do business during this millennium. Sustainability as a trend goes

beyond the rearrangement of government powers and growing economies because it requires a more fundamental mind shift, a shift from our long relation to the environment as an externality. The industrial revolution helped to consolidate and speed up a mindset of make-use-waste

and for years resources seemed abundant and waste was easily handled.Society is receiving messages that this old mindset and current reality do not work well together anymore. Understanding sustainability today is both a business opportunity and an alignment of doing good and

doing well, of creating value for both shareholders and society. This mind shift is also a transition in our practices and businesses. A company and a society cannot become sustainable in one bound, but an understanding of our natural and social system can give us the ability to define

and strategically move towards a sustainable future. For more than 25 years civil society has been working to define a supportive framework that can both be scientifically robust and practically applicable. An exploration that started in the 1980s by a group of scientists in Sweden became that framework.

Strategic Sustainable Development

How can we live

understanding sustainability today is a business opportunity of creating value for

shareholders and society

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A set of four sustainability principles that incorporates all the general aspects of sustainability and are clear and direct to inform decision-makers is known today as a Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD). Also known as the Natural Step Framework, the FSSD is continuously researched by the international NGO known by the same name.The FSSD is supporting organiza-tions and communities around the world to understand the core of sustainability, to support systematic planning and to make sense of the many tools and con-cepts in the field. Some compa-nies are working to combine the short and medium-term benefits with the long-term imperative of sustainability. Low-investment actions based on substituting materials, reducing consumption or rethinking design are saving costs and generating new prod-ucts and services. Companies are saving up to 38% in one year, small businesses up to 66%.Enough reason to invest some time in looking at the impact of sustainability in your company? There’s more: imagine how the next generation will deal with it. What is likely to happen to your customers, employees and regulatory governmental bodies in the future? The importance of both today’s bottom line and a strategy that allows the company to be resilient in the future indicates that incorporating sustainability strategically is good business. Some companies have pioneered and harvested the benefits of it: Nike, Rohm and Haas, IKEA and Scandic Hotels are among those who incorporated strategic

sustainable development using the support of FSSD.Executives and communication professionals that are taking sustainability seriously sometimes get lost on trendy actions that lead to expensive marketing campaigns later interpreted as greenwashing by the media and civil society organizations. A big company in Europe recently was targeted by NGOs who accused it of greenwashing: a lack of understanding of what it strategically means to incorporate sustainability generated a bad communication strategy.

Communication StrategyAs a megatrend of the millen-nium, more and more people are learning about sustainability every day, some of them learning from the organizational actions them-selves and therefore propagating the story of that brand together with the sustainability concept. Successful companies work-ing with the FSSD are opting for word of mouth of their commit-ment and innovation towards sustainability instead of a big marketing campaign explor-ing the yet not fully understood

concept. One example is Max Hamburgers in Sweden – HR and Sustainability Director Pär Larshans says that “not a penny” went for advertising, but commu-nicating their vision and winning stories brought them international recognition and coverage.Organizations that are doing good also communicate well by innovating in two ways:

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about... augusto cuginottiAugusto Cuginotti holds an MSc in Stra-tegic Leadership towards Sustainability from BTH/Sweden. He has worked on organizational development focusing on systemic analysis of processes for both private and governmental organizations in Europe, South America and Asia. He is currently working on supporting organi-zations to co-design their strategies and processes, including advising decision-makers on how to strategically integrate sustainability. Augusto is a contributor to the book Facilitating Sustainable Innova-tion through Collaboration.

by strategically incorporating sustainability into their communications plan and by exploring innovative ways of spreading their message. According to the expert in

communications for sustainability Jennifer Nichols, a good strategic communication plan successfully incorporates sustainability when looked at through the lens of the FSSD. She also points out that innovative ways to communicate sustainability have been developed by using storytelling, community-based social marketing and social media.

the lack of understanding of what it strategically means to incorporate sustainability generated a bad communication strategy