Systems strategy for sustainability - where to start?
Repatterning your organisation's ecosystem can uncover value and create incredible outcomes.
We help teams and organisations reframe the choices ahead of them by going beyond data insights and drawing on the wisdom, ideas and perspective of a wider community of relevant stakeholders. We help leaders develop better questions and shape a better agenda to drive their purpose forward.
We support you in co-creating visions and scenarios of the future that enable your organisation to thrive in the context of volatility and uncertainty. Learn how to be a better expedition guide to the future by exploring signals of change and helping your teams tune into stakeholders to discover new perspectives, insights and value.
Here’s a selection of the frameworks and processes we use with organisations:
The Five Stories of Sustainability Transition
If you’re writing a Transition Plan, or have one on the horizon, this short interactive guide will help you and your team consider key questions.
RePattern Depth Charging: relook, discover, redesign for more impactful outcomes
The starting point is to explore what could be most effective in ‘opening’ the space of possibilities. Our working habits, patterns of relationship and expectations, and the stories we hold about ourselves and others, can hinder us from a radically open exploration that could result in new, emergent discoveries. Creating the conditions for that type of openness often requires stepping into a very different (although possibly more natural) environment, experimenting with creativity and play, nurturing reconnection and empathy, and recognising the thinking patterns that block ideas from others and unintentionally close off opportunities for development.
We consider lines of inquiry such as:
What holds the organisation back from achieving its highest potential purpose?
What signals might your stakeholders be reacting to from across the ecosystem, and what conditions would need to be in place for change to occur?
What are the critical factors that would enable our outputs to have the desired impact?
By releasing the latent ideas and exploring new patterns of relationship across an ecosystem, organisations can create a new compelling vision for breakthrough impact and innovation. This takes the practical form of tangible projects, emblematic of a new future, enabling the organisation to create a new narrative based on a more transformational impact strategy.
RePattern Project Reload: review and find additional value from past projects
If you feel that your sustainability projects were completed but not necessarily ‘successful’ in terms of meeting targets, then you’re not alone. By looking again at your process and results, RePattern can unlock hidden additional value and clarify the pathway to stronger results in future projects.
RePattern Strategy Advance: reframing present interactions to reimagine the path ahead
Strategy retreats can help organisations keep on course.
But transformation requires a Strategy Advance.
Much of the language of strategy has military origins. The role of a retreat – a space for considered reflection – is vital in the rhythm of any organisation. It helps collective exploration and recognition of what is changing in the external environment and how the organisation can successfully adapt itself.
If done well, it isn’t a purely internal process; stakeholders are often consulted for input. But very often, especially for organisations under time and resource pressures, the interactions with partners, clients, suppliers and other stakeholders is framed quite tightly to be ‘efficient’. There’s an interpretation of previous patterns of behaviour and relationship which guide what an organisation thinks the other is capable of, and interested in. Even if conversations are opened up, it’s difficult for the other not to project it’s own views of what the organisation approaching it wants, needs or can offer. That results in a whole range of possibilities being filtered out because we assume it’s not likely to happen.
Exploring the un-mapped possibility space beyond assumptions and projections requires a fundamentally different orientation and process. It requires a Strategy Advance: convening a team or organisation’s ecosystem purposefully to disrupt assumptions based on past patterns of behaviour.
It requires approaching conversations with a more radical form of openness and flexibility, held within a safe space of managed expectations to allow free exploration.
It means loosening the grip on the way things are done today (the products, processes and policies) and enabling new design solutions to emerge based on more fundamental objectives about what an organisation really wants to achieve in the world.
And it would intentionally make a commitment to nurture ideas emerging from new patterns of relationship across the ecosystem, making ‘what-if’ thinking more tangible and sowing the seeds for deeper long-term transformation.
RePattern can design a bespoke Strategy Advance together with your team or organisation, building upon a wide range of leading evidence-based tools and approaches.
RePattern Futures: Incredible Transition Plans
Everyone is going to need to create a transition plan – if it isn’t part of your strategy process it will be soon.
But what happens when you start writing your plan and realise it’s dependant on everyone else’s behaviour?
We rely on our complex ecosystem of stakeholders to behave in a certain way to support our own intentions – so how can we best understand our agency in influencing the system?
- Optimise your contribution towards systemic change by exploring your ecosystem and recognising what is holding it back
- Enlist the help of your broader community to co-create solutions
- Explore ideas you hold back for fear that they wouldn’t be positively received
- Identify key strengths you could tap into to make a bigger difference in the world
- Define your organisation’s understanding of the world around it and how it could influence positive change
RePattern Sustainable Finance
The financial sector now recognises that it is not neutral and has a major impact and influence on the future of economies and society.
With this insight comes responsibility and the potential to optimise the real-world positive impact that can be achieved whilst avoiding or mitigating environmental and social risks. This can be a motivating force for a new generation entering financial services who are determined to develop a career in organisations whose purpose is aligned with their values.
But many of the existing processes which have been efficiently codified and automated in financial institutions are not conducive to exploring new ideas. Sustainability strategies tend to get ‘bolted on’ to existing business practices rather than built-in to emerging business practices.
There are many financial institutions which have reached the point where they recognise that their clients and sectors are all grappling with sustainability challenges – transitioning to net zero, restoring and conserving nature, developing circular business models and supporting the health and wellbeing of people in their community. They now see that a superficial approach to sustainability will not be sufficient to meet client needs or to thrive in the future.
By releasing the talents and energy of your teams to catalyse new sustainable activities you can create regenerative value that strengthens your ecosystem and makes your own business more resilient.
