The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The 17 Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/
A decade ago, few business leaders would have accepted that ending global poverty had anything to do with their business. But the recent decade has shown that social license and community expectations are a critical part of the external factors to your operating model.
A decade ago, understanding and taking action as a business on something like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, would be accomplished with a press release. Now, investors and regulators expect full disclosure of environmental, social and governance issues.
Understanding your current operating model – the value proposition, the principles, the people, the processes and the technology – is complicated enough for many firms. If you are embarking on a transformation, defining the new target operating model and building out the supporting processes and frameworks is tricky too.
The growing pressure from more regulation, legislation and industry standards increases the complexity faced by business leaders. There are so many potential frameworks that you could use to assess where your business stands, that going back to basics is a helpful approach.
Because of the rise of globalised firms, it makes sense to take a global approach to assess the social impact of the components of your operating model. Helpfully, the UN Sustainable Development Goals can provide businesses with an extensive set of considerations to incorporate into an operating model review and target operating model development.
If you aren’t a global business, there is still value in considering how your business can make a positive social impact. If there is a lesson from the past decade, it’s that whatever you previously thought was the boundary of social, regulatory or legislative pressure on business, it is now far more demanding on business than it has ever been.
Many businesses may only be able to impact 1 or 2 of the sustainable development goals, but there is still value in considering all 17 to see if there are areas of your operating model that could change to make a difference.
Goal 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere
The structure of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is useful for an assessment exercise. Each goal is high-level, there is a set of accompanying statistics describing the extent of the societal issue, and there are a series of detailed sub-goals.
The goal to end global poverty in all its forms everywhere is aspirational. It would be fantastic if achieved, and an initial impression could be that this is wholly unrealistic.
However, there are small things that businesses can do to help reduce the incidence and severity of global poverty. More than 700 million people worldwide still live on less than US$1.90 per day. Having a job doesn’t guarantee a proper standard of living as 8% of employed workers and their families lived in extreme poverty in 2018.
Poverty has many dimensions, but its causes include unemployment, social exclusion, and high vulnerability of certain populations to disasters, diseases and other phenomena which prevent them from being productive. Growing inequality is detrimental to economic growth and undermines social cohesion, increasing political and social tensions and, in some circumstances, driving instability and conflicts.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
Assessing Your Strategy And Operating Model
Every business has strategic goals it wants to achieve. The operating model is how it structures its capabilities to deliver on the strategy. These capabilities are groupings of people, processes and technology that create value or support value creation.
For example, your operating model is a crucial driver of decisions to insource or outsource capabilities. When you choose to outsource, your supply chain becomes part of your social impact. Enhanced due diligence on your suppliers and their supply chain is required. You need confidence that your business isn’t inadvertently generating a negative social impact through your supply chain.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals provide an additional set of considerations for business leaders when they are reviewing their overall operating model. There are two areas of questioning – business strategy and operating model.
What is your business strategy? What are your strategic goals? When you are thinking about how to create value, are there aspects of this value creation process that do not align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals?
What is your operating model? What are the key capabilities that you have assembled to deliver value? How do these capabilities create a positive social impact? Can they even contribute to making a positive social impact? Are there negative social impacts from some capabilities that your business has?
How is ending global poverty linked to your strategy and operating model? One helpful mental model is to think about the frontpage rule – is your business doing anything inside its operating model globally that could lead to a headline that accuses your company of perpetuating global poverty?
The location of your physical operations is a crucial consideration when it comes to helping end global poverty. Do you have factories, mines or offices in developing countries? If so, do you have a policy framework for ensuring that you are generating a positive social impact in these countries? Have your risk and compliance teams embarked on enhanced due diligence of your supply chain and recruitment processes in these countries to identify any areas of risk or potential exploitation?
The great news is that almost all global businesses already have robust frameworks in place to ensure that these environmental and social risks are identified and well managed. You can read about these efforts in their annual reports. They regularly engage consultants to benchmark their approach against global standards and identify further remediation required.
The change in thinking for businesses wanting to make a positive social impact is that when making a low level operating model choice, there are multiple competing priorities. Having a principles-based target operating model that gives business leaders the ability to choose different components is essential.
I think that businesses who do not currently use a broad framework like the UN Sustainable Development Goals to explore how they could make a positive social impact are missing something. There is an opportunity to use these goals as a differentiator and to identify how each key capability of your business not only creates value for customers and shareholders but aligns to these goals.
The goals and expectations of your employees matter too. Most millennials care more about the purpose of the work they are doing than the commercial drivers. They understand that a business has to make a profit, but if the operating model that delivers that profit helps create a positive social impact and supports the goal of ending global poverty by 2030, then that is another compelling reason for them to come to work.
Next Steps
- Take a look at https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/poverty/
- Think about how your business could help reduce global poverty
- Think about what your employees expect your social impact to be
- Think about how your current operating model helps or hinders these goals