GEMI Sustainability Disruption Project
GEMI is planning a new Sustainability Disruption Project to bring together corporate sustainability leaders from across sectors to identify, understand and develop strategies to prepare for a wide range of possible future global disruptions that may challenge short to mid-term business sustainability goals, while creating new opportunities for leading organizations to position themselves for greater resiliency and success in the long-term.
In 2019, GEMI worked together with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) to explore various external drivers, or new spectrums, of change that are likely to challenge companies as they strive to meet their business and sustainability goals over the next decade and beyond.
The resulting report – Future Forces Disrupting Sustainable Business – forecast a scrambled future of powerful new technologies, radical visibility/transparency, rising global turbulence and rapid social change where it will be increasingly risky for business leaders to force-fit new threats, or new opportunities, into old categories of thought. While there are many opinions on what exactly those new threats/opportunities may be, leaders across industry tend to agree that new disruptions are on the horizon and that those relating to sustainability are likely to come much more rapidly and with greater impact than some might have anticipated in the past.
While the exact nature and timing of such emerging disruptions is impossible to predict, we can anticipate that those organizations that prepare and create effective strategies for long-term operation today (beyond the career spans of individual people) will be the ones that are most likely to weather increasingly complex and volatile global systems – complete with new disruptions of increasingly frequency and duration – and will be best positioned for long-term growth.
Business leaders will need to begin looking at their business and sustainability strategy through various possible lenses to be ready to navigate an increasingly complex, uncertain, and rapidly changing future environment. Those leaders who are able to identify and understand multiple, possibly divergent, implications of future disruptive events and who are prepared to act on those implications with clarity will likely be best positioned to lead their organizations through the challenges to come.
What will the GEMI Sustainability Disruption Project Do?
Today, corporate sustainability leaders face two distinct but related challenges: how do you keep your sustainability program going through disruptions, and how do current and emerging disruptions inform and alter your corporate sustainability program going forward. To help companies work through these challenges, we will lead project participants through a process via (4) quarterly facilitated, interactive virtual workshops.
The workshops will focus on:
- Approaches to keeping sustainability programs DURING disruptions. – what changes, what is maintained without change, what is leveraged with or by disruptions. And lessons for sustainability programs FROM disruptions – if you knew then what you know now, how would your program look different in the past?
- Implications for corporate sustainability PROGRAMS for the FUTURE. Looking at the program you have and lessons from the previous workshop, how should your sustainability program be the same or different going forward? What would be substantively different? What would be unchanged, but priorities or “packaging” might be different?
- Making those changes stick. The “half-life” of critical events is a well-known phenomenon. Once things settle down (into a new normal, not back to normal), exhaustion and relief often overtake good intentions. What do you do stakeholder engagement, internal and external, to make these changes real and lasting? How can you use goals and metrics to make the learning and changes stick?
How will the GEMI SDP operate?
The GEMI SDP will be led by GEMI members and supported by GEMI’s staff with the support of Scott Nadler, Nadler Strategy LLC. All activities will be led and supported virtually, until such time as it is safe to engage personally. We anticipate the project will kickoff in Q1 2021.
Join Us
Current GEMI Members will be able to participate in the Project as part of their membership contributions to GEMI. Non-member companies and organizations may apply to join the project for a fee of $5,000. To learn more about how to participate, please contact Steve Hellem at shellem@navista.net
