What's your sustainability story?

CEOs need help. They need better stories. It’s taken a while, but now, 23 years after the Brundtland Commission published its groundbreaking report Our Common Future, leaders of business – the people helming the most powerful forces in the world economy – have finally woken up.

According to Accenture in its report A New Era of Sustainability, produced with the UN’s sustainability business initiative, the Global Compact, “In 2010, CEO support for corporate sustainability is nearly unanimous. 93 per cent of the 766 CEOs responding to our online survey believe that sustainability issues will be important or very important to their future success.”

That’s encouraging. It means that the alpha males and females amongst us recognize the value gap between what their markets and investors have tolerated up until now and what firms will be able to get away with in the future. Less encouraging is that the same report still talks about ten-year timeframes, which could make the difference, for example on climate change, between a dangerous two-degree rise in average global temperatures and irreversible catastrophe.

Another report from Deloitte, published this month, found:

“A significant performance gap between what CEOs believe companies should be doing, and what they report on their own company’s performance.”

So why, with a scientific consensus on the climate science and a social media revolution creating a new era of corporate transparency, do bosses still have trouble delivering long-term sustainability plans? Is this really all about the complexity of implementation or is it also something to do with how persuasively they are communicating to staff, investors and clients?

I was lucky enough to travel to Greenland last year with a bunch of high-flying CEOs and CFOs from some of the biggest insurance and property firms in the world, convened by one of their own, to learn about climate change from a team of experts. It was an astonishing trip, not least the sight and sounds of the glacier at Illulisat as it heaves and splits the same ice that once sank the Titanic. But what really sold the issues to this group of over-achievers was not the nature or the science lectures, but the stories that the local Inuit fishermen told about how their landscape was being transformed. The ice was disappearing and with it, their ancient customs, rituals and even diets. You can guess who we were talking about on the flight back home and in the emails that followed.

The fishermen’s moving observations describe a complex situation but fix the key issues in the brain, in the same way that the most successful corporate sustainability campaigns do. Marks and Spencer’s “Plan A”, which sets out their mission to become the world’s most sustainable retailer, and InterfaceFLOR’s “Mission Zero”, which promises to eradicate all of the carpet company’s negative impacts by 2020, are widely regarded as exemplar corporate transformations – achieving traction with customers, staff and investors. True, they are built on complex and far-reaching assessments of their environmental and social impacts. But what makes them fly is that their ambition is articulated coherently and economically, making it easy to grasp and relevant to their audiences.

We’ll always need the numbers, but when we’re talking to our employees, shareholders and clients, we need to think just as hard about how we distill the ideas into a compelling and engaging vision. Equipped with great stories, the CEOs will be in a much better place to deliver the positive impacts that everyone is so ready for business to make right now.