The New Era of Competitive Sustainability: Resilience as a Driver of Innovation

The geopolitical, societal, natural, technological, legislative, commercial and conflict-confused world we now live in often bears a closer resemblance to the mosh pit at a heavy metal gig than to mature and sophisticated societies working towards collective wellbeing.

Nations, continents and long-established allegiances are shifting with the accelerated fluidity of rapidly melting glaciers. Long-considered and carefully nurtured economic, energy and military policies are being torn up, with replacements frantically typed into autocues or rewritten by AI bots with increasingly furrowed brows. This context is triggering a stereotypical doubling-down on quarterly performance within commercial organizations.

Teams find themselves in a twisted metaphor: the innovative future they were once ‘building while flying’ has become a ragged, battle-scarred relic that leaders still believe will deliver customer value, low costs and happy shareholders. All this despite the fact that nobody thinks flying is a good idea anymore. The sunny beach they were heading towards is now choked with microplastics and the local population has grown weary of 18-hour factory shifts.

Sustainability and commercial performance are still pulling in opposite directions

But have no fear for these poor, confused value hunters. They are not alone. The parallel universe of ESG also finds itself equally discombobulated. Its virtue-laden “I told you so” protests are going unheard as it parks itself in a compliance cul-de-sac called ‘Greenhushing Lane’.

Despite the growing evidence that ‘business as usual’ no longer works for either the inhabitants of ‘Camp Value’ or ‘Camp Virtue’, there is very little sign of collaborative effort to find new approaches that benefit everyone. Instead, both sides remain locked in a pointless battle of principles, arguing like children in the back seat of a car.

Rethinking competition, sustainability and business value

When we sat down to write about overcoming the impasse between sustainability and commerciality, we quickly realized that we couldn’t produce an overextended blog that would be out of date before the end of the first chapter. We needed to break away from the twin GROWTH and DOOM scrolls of LinkedIn and reconsider everything from first principles, even the very idea of competition itself.

That journey quickly revealed that, alongside the technical solutions we already have to help save the planet, we also possess many of the leadership and social solutions. What we lack, however, are the shared doorways that bring these two camps together in positive and innovative ways, spaces where they can align, even if only on a single KPI (key performance indicator).

This is the goal: to explore the wealth of thought leadership on competition and sustainability produced by many skilled and inspiring individuals and to identify the common ground. The shared doorways that can spark fresh thinking and new ways to make business both more sustainable and more competitive.

How resilience, circularity and regeneration create competitive advantage

The encouraging news is that there is a world of opportunity. Opportunities where reciprocity builds resilience, where circularity re-establishes market relevance and where regeneration restores the resources that businesses depend on.

We must not seek to solve all, or even any, of the challenges we collectively face, but rather we need to provide inspiration and tools for discovering those shared doorways through which solutions may emerge.

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