What is ‘we?’
7 years, 3 months, 7 days, 19 hours
14 April 2022
Critical for me is that we start by embracing the broadest possible definition of "we".
What is it we are trying to achieve? I'm sorry if that is a heavy question, but it is something I am repeatedly being asked, in slightly different ways, such as the challenging ‘How can you say we should be Purpose with Profit?’, the classic ‘So what does success look like?’ and the more personal ‘So what do you think we should do?’.
Critical for me in answering this question is that we start by embracing the broadest possible definition of "we". We is not you and me in this conversation. It is not we as one business amongst many. It is not we as citizens of this particular country. It is not even we as in those who happen to be alive on the planet today. For me "we" has to encompass the collective mindset of humanity now and into the future. Some may argue that it needs to go beyond humanity to embrace all living things, but I will set that one aside for the moment.
This broad definition matters a lot, because it means you, me, our families, our community and our collective that is our business, can see ourselves as holding a shared responsibility for a global destiny. If we is just ‘we help our clients’, or ‘we support our colleagues’ that is good, but not good enough.
So then. We for what?. For what it is we are trying to achieve I believe we must all get behind the achievement of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They were developed over many years with a very high degree of consultation. They have been adopted by 193 of the world's nations. And they represent a balanced scorecard of all the things we need to do to enable a sustainable quality of life for everyone, everywhere. Indeed since we have so little time, I would now regard it as criminally self-indulgent and distracting for any person or organisation to try to advance an alternative.
What prompted me to this particular theme was a conversation on Wednesday with Martin Rich, one of the two founders of a charity called Future-Fit Foundation. What I really like about the Future-Fit framework is that it provides a route for businesses to understand how their actions can support the SDGs, rather than seeing the SDGs as only relevant to public policy. This is critical because it connects ‘ESG’, which is focussed on the footprint of a particular organisation and its stakeholders, to that wider purpose of our global collective future.