Objective: Identify where you want to be. Focus: Being honest about where you are and setting your overall ambition for the future helps you frame the conversation in your agency (and with clients) and provides you with a north star when setting targets.
Before taking any meaningful action in your organisation, it really helps to sit back and be honest about where you currently are in tackling this agenda. Then you can set a realistic ambition of where you want to be.
For long-term resilience of our society and economy, the science is clear about the direction we need all businesses to move towards. However, many agencies, particularly small and medium-sized businesses, are focused on immediate commercial survival, and planning five or 10 years into the future is a luxury they feel they can’t afford.
The business case section of this guide may help to reshape thinking towards sustainability, particularly for those that view it as a cost to their business, rather than the value creator that it can be.
For smaller agencies, a clear value-creation opportunity can come from placing a strong focus on sustainability.
Step 1: Set your ambition
1.1 Identify where you are and where you want to be
Our conversations with agencies that have already started their journey towards environmental sustainability reveal they can be grouped into three broad categories. Click on the images below, read the category descriptions by industry leaders and ask yourself honestly where your agency is now, and where you really want your agency to be.
Diagnostic quiz
This short diagnostic test can help you to assess if you lean towards Passive, Participant or Pioneer and set you on the way.
Passives
This is Business As Usual. Agencies seeking to comply with laws and legislation because they must.
Participants
This is about incremental change. The majority of agencies that have started their journey in sustainability are in this group.
Pioneers
Agencies breaking new ground in sustainability efforts. These are trailblazers, trendsetters and influencers in the industry.
Future fit
The majority of industry leaders we spoke to said they want their businesses to be Pioneers but felt that barriers to change (outlined in the accompanying Agents of change: The expert view report) are currently keeping them in the Participant category. The exceptions are agencies whose high degree of independence allows them to act faster and more definitively to drive change.
Agencies that are part of larger group structures tend to be in the second category. Why? Because they told us getting to the point of meaningful change requires significant shifts in the mindset and culture of their organisations, and this is hard and takes time. This includes the predominant mindset of short-term revenue focused targets.
Helping all agencies to become Participants would be a step forward, but real change that has a truly positive impact on people and the planet will come from businesses shifting to category three – Pioneers and adopting a transformative agenda. This is the change that agencies need to make to build future-fit, resilient businesses.
Recommendation
It’s a good idea to review your ambition level once you have built a deeper understanding of the issues and how they may affect your business going forward. See steps 2.4 Be informed and 2.5 Identify your hotspots.
Next: 2 Build the foundations