I’ve been thinking about how the techniques we use at Zumio suit organisations looking to become more sustainable. Sustainability, of course, is a social challenge as much as a technical one – while eco-efficiency (making products using more sustainable materials and processes) is a critical aspect, many of the barriers to more sustainable practice have social aspects.

Today I’ve been thinking about two areas in particular that can benefit from research and social design methods – they are Product Service Systems (PSS) and organisational capabilities building and communication.

PSS

While PSS in and of itself is not a panacea, the concept will no doubt play an important role in our shift towards a sustainable economy.

Qualitative research methods are very well suited to understanding the broader context of user needs and motivations, an essential component of defining and identifying opportunities for PSS.

Many of the benefits from service design principles (including prototyping and user testing) can then be applied to the development of the PSS to help increase uptake, among other things. An example of this can be seen in live|work’s work with Streetcar.

Organisational capacity building and communications

BSR and IDEO’s Aligned for Sustainability (PDF) report outlines a number of factors required for building sustainable thinking within an organisation. The report suggests that cross-functional communications, sharing learnings, and collaborative problem solving with people throughout an organisation are all important facets of building such capacity.

Social technologies, or “Enterprise 2.0″ approaches, can clearly play an important role here. But design approaches such as stakeholder workshops, personas, customer journey mapping, prototyping – especially when collaboratively generated – can all help with both building capacity (through better sharing of learnings and incorporating more diverse input in the design process) and communicating concepts and learning.

So it seems to me that the same tools that we can apply to generate opportunities for innovation can also be applied to achieve sustainable outcomes. In this model, far from sustainability being an “added cost” over an above standard operations, we can instead frame sustainability thinking as a lever for innovation. To me, this is a very exciting prospect, and something I’m looking forward to exploring further…

On Friday morning (before I had to dash to Melbourne) I was lucky enough to attend an excellent session organised by ASIX with Charles Leadbeater – Collaboration by Design – on design and social innovation.

I hope to document some thoughts and notes from the workshop proper soon, but I just quickly wanted to note an insight born of the conversation with some of the folks I was lucky enough to share a table with. I was able to put my finger on something I’ve been thinking on for a while, and wanted to put “pen to paper”, as it were, for future reflection.

In thinking about EMSs (for my recent Masters assignment) and the trajectory that Zumio is on, the idea of Triple Bottom Line (TBL) has come up as a potential path forward. While I appreciate the importance and value of TBL approaches, it hasn’t had the same resonance as some other ideas (such as Cradle to Cradle) and I think I’ve worked out why.

My perception of TBL is that it is a method of accounting for financial, social and environmental activities. While this is important, and in the context of environmental reporting can uncover specific opportunities for waste reduction and cost savings (among other things), ultimately it in principle isn’t aimed at driving business value.

I say this for a few reasons: firstly, the concept of 3 bottom lines implies a segregation of concerns. While I concede that some practitioners likely take a more holistic approach, the underlying framing, or lense, does not lend itself to such an approach.

By considering each in isolation there is a risk that opportunities will be considered only in relation to each pillar, missing opportunities that cross 2 or more pillars.

The second is that TBL seems primarily concerned with measurement, whereas I see the value in a sustainability as a means of creating “thick” value.

If you use your financials as the lense by which to view your business to create value, you are going to focus primarily on cost cutting and methods of incrementing revenue (i.e. raising prices for small improvements or using emotional/branding drivers to create a premium, without necessarily increasing real value to customers).

In a similar way, using such a lense on social and environmental factors alone is likely to lead to similar outcomes – primarily internally and operationally focused, rather than achieving innovation outcomes.

In this sense, a TBL approach feels a little bit like the tail wagging the dog.

It is clear that operational considerations are essential to successful service delivery and can sometimes result in innovation, but I think a conception of sustainability that is embedded within a deeper consideration of value creation is a more constructive frame of reference.