Good Business: Designing for Social Impact

INCREASING YOUR ORGANISATION’S POSITIVE IMPACT 

More and more companies are taking cues from society to reorient themselves towards being responsible for causing a positive impact in the world. Business leaders are hearing the calls for a purpose beyond profit.  

Cues have been heard for years: 

• 1% protestors pushing back against seemingly greedy individuals running seemingly greedy corporations at the expense of employees and communities  

• the shock at the negligent behaviours that led to the global financial crisis in 2007 

• shareholder action demanding companies stop funding disinformation campaigns against established climate change science.  

On the flip side, there has been a rise of social enterprises, or companies whose purpose is to make money while doing good for society. The release of Conscious Capitalism in 2013, authored by Whole Food’s John Mackey with management thinker Raj Sisodia, inspired a global movement as business leaders were effectively given permission, through modelling John Mackey’s success, to become a more socially and environmentally impactful. 

Back in 1999 sustainability consultancy pioneers, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) wrote ‘Natural Capitalism’, a scientifically based, systems thinking proposal for adding one principle to market capitalism, to replace the natural resources businesses use. In the 2000s, RMI developed an open-source prototype design for electric vehicles, energy-efficient office buildings, and other now-mainstream sustainable practices. 

Society is not quietening, and furthermore, mainstream business is moving in response. 

PURPOSE-LED FAD OR BOTTOM-LINE FACT? 

The world of business is rightly sceptical of fads and new ways of business, particularly those without a track record. This new perspective is based on evidence, both scientific and ‘real life’.  

For example, there is now a vast literature describing the virtuous feedback loop between employee engagement and business performance; work on increasing employee engagement and business performance increases. We too have noticed that increasing employee engagement results in leaps in outcome measures for customers, employees, shareholders, and beyond. We use this as a design principle when developing transformation programmes with clients. The longest-lasting improvements to business performance come by creating a working environment that unleashes and encourages discretionary effort, rather than suppressing it. 

Turning from people to the environment: climate change has heightened for a generation of people facing questions from their children about what they did to prevent climate change. These people are becoming organisational leaders and can see they can use their professional position for greater leverage than just taking personal action. Implementing positive impact policies, changing how their products are made and how their services are delivered are the levers that will move the world. 

While there have been early movers of funding socially beneficial outcomes, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives in play since the 2000s often weren’t able to realign a business behind a socially-responsible purpose. Even with the best intentions, most of these CSR programmes create great outcomes but often don’t minimise negative impacts.  

Companies following a purpose-driven strategy transform themselves, their services and products into authentic expressions of their newly-core desire to do well by doing good. A compelling purpose embedded into how the business works not only unleashes motivation in your people but also in your customers. Customers are increasingly considering whether a company is aligned to their values in their buying decisions. Customers will also often pay a premium to buy from a values-aligned company.   

Increasing the positive social impact of your company is now a necessary bottom-line performance strategy. 

SO, HOW TO DO IT? 

Bandura’s social cognitive theory suggests that our behaviour is determined by a combination of what we believe, our environment, and the response we get to our actions. This is a three-way feedback loop. 

This also applies to organisations. There is a three-way feedback loop between organisational beliefs (Culture, Strategy, Policies), corporate actions (Products, Services, Processes) and the workplace environment (Spaces, Technology, Location).

This simple but powerful insight drives our Business Design Method, and how we are helping our clients reorient their businesses for greater positive social and environmental impact: 

It can start with Purpose Design: co-designing a purpose statement that speaks to your organisation’s business mission as well as the societal impact you seek to have. This is a great process for harnessing energy in the humans in your business. Most people present at work as one-dimensional ‘roles’ rather than fully expressed, whole ‘humans.’ This means most people only apply part of themselves to their work, leaving a resource of energy, creativity, and ability untapped and wasted. Purpose Design helps to unlock this extra resource.

For example, Smart DCC is a UK company that manages the country’s smart meter network. Their purpose is to, “enable the lower carbon economy needed to meet ambitious climate change targets and to ensure our children inherit a clean planet.” This is a purpose people can invest themselves in. 

A societally beneficial purpose guides the development or realignment of your business model and strategy to realise this purpose. You translate this strategy and its goals into products and services that add value to society and our environment through human-centred value design and service design.  

Human-centred design uses empathy to guide the design of your products, services, and internal processes, a pathway to positive impacts beyond profit. It helps you answer the question, ‘how will this bit of our business provide value to all our stakeholders, or at least, not destroy value they already have? 

“I think what FromHereOn do is bring together a collection of practices to really help transform an organisation, but then equip that organisation to continue the transformation journey itself. Bringing together a human- centred mindset, service design, enterprise architecture and a fantastic approach to communications, adoption and change hits the real sweet spot in how to engage a large organisation in a significant transformation like ours” 

— Rachel Higham, Managing Director of IT, BT. 
Service Portfolio Design at Scale 

THIS REORIENTATION IS A LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE AS MUCH AS AN ORGANISATIONAL CHALLENGE.  

It gladdens our hearts (we are humans!) as we help more leaders realise their human-centred, society-centred, planet-centred ambitions.  To work together, reach out to our team of Transformation Consultants.