I am a big fan of the Future-Fit Business Benchmark as I value that it is underpinned by strong systems science and it helps businesses understand the destination they need to aim for, while providing the means to assess progress.
But driving the cultural change needed to implement the benchmark is hard work and that’s where we come in. If you are supporting companies on a journey to become Future-Fit, the free resources we have developed at the Embedding Project are worth exploring, alongside the Benchmark. We provide a set of practical resources to help any company reach its desired destination.
The Embedding Project is a global public-benefit research project that brings together business sustainability researchers and corporate sustainability change agents from a broad range of industries around the world, to harness their collective knowledge and develop rigorous but practical guidance to help companies embed sustainability into their day-to-day operations and decision-making. Our free tools and guides are developed following an extensive and rigorous research process, then piloted with multinational companies in a range of different industries, before being released into the public domain.
Our Climate Position Statement Guide, for example, is the product of a systematic review of over 2,000 climate change position statements from a wide range of geographies and industries, as well as interviews with over 200 corporate directors.
For change agents who are looking to better embed sustainability by shifting the stories that get told in their organisation, our Narrative Infrastructure Guide might be a useful starting point.
For those trying to understand what leading goal setting looks like, we have just released a Contextual Goals Database that systematically compares sustainability goals set by large companies globally and the degree to which they align with key environmental or social thresholds. You can use it to benchmark your own goal setting and search by issue, company, industry, SDG target, or goal type. This goal setting approach compliments the Business Benchmark by allowing companies to understand how to take meaningful steps in pursuit of Future-Fit’s challenging Break-Even Goals.
It’s thanks to contributions from our global partners and a $2.5 million grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) that the Embedding Project is able to make its resources available for free, so please take advantage of them. To see the array of tools and resources available to support your work, head to our website at www.embeddingproject.org.
If you are keen to learn more about what we do, our current resources and what’s under development, and how the Embedding Project and Future-Fit align, we will be co-hosting a webinar with Dr Geoff Kendall on 30th January. We hope that you can join us and invite you to register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uqnrYcDTSty5S7NimBxntA.
