Values are a key link between the “inner” and the “outer”. Values matter in an organization or a community, because they provide a consistent guide to decision making, in particular when one value may conflict with another.

In business, values are, too often, a set of nice sounding words on a plaque in the lobby.

Perhaps this is because we confuse values with ideals. People tend to think that values must represent the best of who we are, and of course must be positive.  But what if you work in a company where, for example, secrecy is a hallowed principle of management decision making, but we can’t admit to that without – well – violating that value?  Even if it doesn’t sound warm and fuzzy, isn’t that truly a value?

How do we incorporate values into the practice of strategic planning, and performance management?  The first step is to be able to actually measure values.

My friend and colleague Kathryn Alexander has developed a values assessment tool that links values to business behavior and performance outcomes.  This tool is the basis for a certification program she has developed, called Forever Green™, that provides a “maturity model” for business and other organizations working to improve ethical and sustainable performance.

Kathryn’s work over the years has demonstrated that the values that support sustainability correlate well with an organization’s  capacity for innovation and resilience. On the other hand, there are competing sets of values that will actively undermine a firms ability to achieve sustainability. These values also undermine the resilience and creativity of the firm. In the emerging business paradigm, a commitment to sustainability is just plain good business.

Why?  In a nutshell, sustainability thinking is inherently long term, acknowledges complexity, and addresses what are becoming key risk areas in an age of unprecedented transparency.

This is why tools for measuring values are critical.  How can these metrics be integrated into an overall strategy, using the Balanced Scorecard?

Here’s an example of how a values-based sustainability theme can be expressed in a Strategy Map.  In the Balanced Scorecard, the most foundational level – what we call Organizational Capacity – is intimately linked to leadership, culture and values.  And, thanks to the work of people like Kathryn, we can now measure the evolution of values over time in an organization.

For an organization to develop a sustainable business model, the most basic ingredient is a declaration by leaders that this will be so. This declaration is the basis of a culture that attracts and reinforces like-minded employees.  This builds a culture of people who enter creatively into the collaborative design and implementation of more sustainable products and processes.

This process also has an impact on branding – telling the story of the product, and of the way the company does business, in a way that attracts the attention of consumers whose values match yours.   This in turn results in enhanced customer loyalty and positive revenue results.

Building a Balanced Scorecard begins with the collaborative creation of a Strategy Map. The Strategy Map is a highly visual, and easily communicated, way to illustrate how the strategy of the enterprise translates into measurable objectives in each of the four perspectives – finance, customer, process, and organization – that together create a holistic view of sustainable organizational performance.

Sustainability is NOT a single objective with its own metrics.  Rather, sustainability is a theme that is reflected in each of these perspectives.

• From a financial standpoint, sustainability means staying in business.
• From a customer standpoint, sustainability means satisfying, even delighting, the sustainability-conscious consumer.
• From a process standpoint, sustainability means we manage materials, energy, and waste in the most eco-efficient way possible.
• From an organizational standpoint, sustainability means creating a culture that values sustainability, reflected in the choices that employees make every day.

The Strategy Map tells a story about how we will collaborate to achieve all these objectives:

• We will build new sources of revenue by creating positive branding and customer experience connected with how we design and build our products, and how our customers use and dispose of them.  This will be supported by appealing to emerging shifts in consumer tastes by pro-actively communicating our values, and our value, to targeted customers.
• We will reduce operating costs by improving efficiencies in the way we manage materials, energy, and waste disposal, and by the way we identify and manage enterprise risk. This will be supported by improved eco-efficiency of our products, supported by innovative product design, reduced product life-cycle impacts, and strong stakeholder partnering.
• We will reduce risk through a better understanding of the our environmental and social impacts, and through better  relationships with stakeholders including NGO’s, lawmakers, regulators, and members of the communities we impact.
• Underlying all these activities is a commitment to build and reinforce a strong sustainability culture in our enterprise, supported by the right employee skills and knowledge, as well as information systems that give us the capability to measure both sustainability impacts and customer sentiment via social media analysis.

1. How does the business appear from the perspective of an owner or investor?
2. How does the business provide value to customers, and how does that affect their buying behavior and attitudes?
3. How can we provide this value with maximum efficiency in terms of cost/materials/energy ?
4. What organizational capacities – both tangible and intangible – do we need to put in place and maintain?

Each of these questions answers the concerns of a particular constituency.

1. Owners, investors and analysts view the organization as a system that provides return on investment.
2. Customers see the business’ products and services as a way to satisfy wants and desires at an appropriate cost – and, less tangibly, may buy out of an identification with brand.
3. Efficiency, particularly sustainability metrics, is the concern of internal management and staff – as well as external constituencies such as as NGO’s, regulators, and the public at large that may not necessarily be investors or consumers.
4. Organizational capacity is the foundation of the others – the physical infrastructure, culture, skills, and information systems required to plan, design, and deliver products and services.

Taken together, the answers to the four questions build a holistic view of the enterprise that describes:

• How non-financial factors (the “intangibles” that make up 50-75% of market value, including leadership, values, culture, and relationships) influence financial performance
• How we get there – translating strategies into actionable, accountable and measurable objectives -that easily and visually communicate the strategy to everyone in the organization
• How sustainability performance impacts “conventional” measures of success like financial and market performance

The last point is why Balanced Scorecard is a useful addition to the big outcome measures found in frameworks like the Global Reporting Initiative.  The result is a collaboratively-developed “Story of the Strategy” that identifies the connection between sustainability performance and market and financial outcomes. This connection may be unique for every enterprise – although GRI identifies the important environmental and social outcomes that matter to all of us, each company has to do the heavy lifting of relating those outcomes to its own competitive differentiation.

These frameworks and certification standards are a huge step forward.  They have utilized extensive multi-sector collaboration to develop consensus about what sustainable business should look like.

What’s the matter with this picture?  Most of the measures employed tend to focus on big outcomes, or on very particular operational processes.  Like many first-generation approaches to performance management, we end up with a loose collection of measures, with no clue how they integrate to create business value. What’s missing is a link that lets the individual business make the connection between sustainability and business success.

The result?  Separate management systems.  Separate reports, one for the NGO’s, one for the financial analysts and investors.

To really take hold,  reporting must address the question of how  sustainability can contribute to the business’ need to satisfy customers and shareholders.

The Balanced Scorecard is an ideal tool for achieving this.  It answers the question “How do we get there?”

Development of a Balanced Scorecard translates your business strategy into a highly visual “Strategy Map” that shows  how sustainability goals interact with other operations, and in turn impact business outcomes like brand recognition, sales performance, cost  reduction, risk management, profitability, and share price.  Development of the strategy map gets everyone on the same page, building a shared understanding of priorities, measures and accountabilities.

To be continued…..

So what’s the problem, I asked?

Nobody else is buying into it, he said.

Why? To make a long story short, he had gone into his office, shut the door, and laid out his view of how the company would be successful.  Only problem was, he didn’t get anyone else involved in the process.

The best plan in the world will not succeed if the people responsible for implementing it don’t buy in to the program.  “Buy in” requires that all concerned get to say their piece, and believe they’ve been heard, whether their idea is adopted or not.

In most of today’s complex business planning situations, two (or more) heads are better than one. How to bring out the best collective intelligence of a group?

An effective, collaborative planning exercise requires a balance of two kinds of conversations:

Divergent thinking is a process of exploring possibilities, brainstorming, different or emerging perspectives, thinking outside the box. The wise leader encourages these contributions from everyone involved.

And, at the end of the day, there needs to be a focus and a plan.  This is convergent thinking – out of all those possibilities, where will we focus?

I’ve heard a lot of leaders say “We operate by consensus around here”, but I seldom believe it.  Often the appearance of consensus is like one of those elections in a country where, say, 95% of the voters support the incumbent. It’s just that people don’t dare to voice what they really think. Everyone would like to believe that a consensus is desirable – but it’s not always possible. If everyone has had their say, however, and understands the reasons for picking that focus, you’ll have a much happier team.

Lean thinking offers a powerful combination of “hard” and “soft” management techniques that have been proven by Toyota and many other organizations.  The answer to the question “what would green look like?” is a specific set of metrics, against which current performance and future goals can be benchmarked.  The metrics are the reference point for all conversations about continuous improvement.  The (so called) “soft” side is the level of collaboration, trust, and honesty in the culture that allows those conversations to be effective. Combining the two, there can be a realistic assessment of what is,  creative imagination of what could be,  collaborative prototyping of new tools and practices, and ongoing performance improvement.

Included in a well designed performance measurement framework, such as a Balanced Scorecard, sustainability initiatives can be linked to impacts on costs, revenues, and profits.  More and more companies, like Dell Computer are actually saving money by reducing their carbon footprint.  With the right metrics, sustainability efforts are going beyond idealism and becoming just good business practice.