A variety of challenges
Organisations focused on improving their performance against ESG targets have a variety of challenges to achieving and reporting their goals. One challenge is the wide range of different Environmental Social and Governance standards and competition between them which means that different standards may differ in how targets are to be reported, and in the future, it is hard to say which will become the most important. Another significant issue is the range of different ESG goals that standards organisations report on, all requiring distinctive approaches to achieve meaningful change, potentially blocking any effort to achieve overall high ESG performance.
Risk in ESG strategy
There is therefore, risk, in terms of pursuing a cost-effective ESG strategy:
Risk your business might need to change standards that one reports under,
Risk reputationally from pursuing a too narrow range of ESG goals, or,
Risk from pursuing too many different goals with little success or budget to achieve meaningful results.
Risk because the budget for ESG is difficult to spend wisely; Even if focused on a narrower range of goals, lots of investment can be made, often with little success.
Risk, even if short-term progress can be achieved, that this is not translated into sustainable, longer-term progress.
Turing Meta's organisational science approach addresses ESG risk
Turing Meta leverages cutting edge research in biology in order to identify new organisational solutions to these problems. Using the concept of organisation games, an extension of game theory, which has been developed for jointly modelling organisational problems in biological systems and human organisations. Using this model will enable your organisation to obtain a decisive advantage in pursuing an effective ESG strategy across a wide range of ESG goals, in a cost effective way.
How organisation games can be leveraged in your organisation
The main insight from organisation games for ESG is that different objectives or goals cannot all be effectively pursued independently as stand-alone goals but rather, benefit from cooperation by also slightly modifying core business goals. Cutting-edge biology research shows us that there is a fundamental tradeoff between unnecessary ‘precision’ or ‘efficiency’ and all other goals to be achieved. Core business goals typically include some unnecessary ‘precision’ in their specification, which is worth very little to the organisation, but reduces the room to achieve all ‘peripheral’ goals, such as ESG goals, in general.
An example is setting a requirement as a business that its website achieves 99.99% availability.
While 99.9% might be worth a significant amount to the business, the last 0.1% is likely to be worth a tenth of a cent on the dollar, yet achieving it costs a significant amount to all other goals that relate to the engineering team that is set this core business goal.
Who shouts loudest wins
Setting additional specific ESG goals doesn’t address this, and leads to a conversation where ‘who shouts loudest’ wins. As they are always peripheral to the core business in certain respects, ESG goals are less likely to progress efficiently in the long-term. But by also making the core business goals part of the ‘conversation’ and reducing unnecessary precision in core business goals that actually doesn’t cost the organisation, more ‘room’ is created for all ESG goals at the same time.
This makes ESG goals more likely to progress, with more flexibility in terms of the goals to focus on, and less risk overall in the ESG strategy, and higher ROI on the ESG investment.
American Airlines, Google, Microsoft Collaboration
Even where the loss of precision in your core business goal does cost something to a business, such as in the choice of less fuel efficient flight paths by American Airlines, it can still make sense to reduce the precision of the core goal this way. Atmospheric conditions contribute to contrail formation from the exhaust of jet aeroplanes which adds to global warming, but by varying the flight path using weather satellite images this can be reduced.
Google, Microsoft and American Airlines showed they can reduce global warming choosing from diverse air routes those with less contrail formation with just a range of ~2% more fuel use compared to the ‘optimal’ route.
This is a general example of how changing core business goals helps with a ‘peripheral’ ESG objective. But while flight paths of jets are highly optimised and expensive to change, many core business goals contain unnecessary precision that costs very little or nothing to remove and can also help with ESG objectives.
Outcomes
The outcome is that the organisation is more likely to achieve ESG goals, and significantly outperform in this area.
By also focusing effort on modifying core business goals, your organisation reduces the risk of investment in EDI in specific EDI goals becoming wasted by changes to reporting standards, regional regulations, etc.
In addition, your organisation becomes a systemic ‘ally’ of ESG goals with more concrete core business goal setting that contributes to ESG so involving the business, yet also not costing the organisation since the changes to core goals remove unnecessary ‘precision’ that is worth very little to your organisation to achieve.
As a result, the whole organisation becomes more efficient and effective, and the long-term benefits of many ESG goals to the organisation’s performance can be realised.
ROI is also more likely to be realised to the core business, in addition to performance on ESG goals because of the better returns on your ESG investment.
This approach works with any type of core business goal, relating to ‘deadlines’, ‘efficiencies’ ‘productivity’, ‘hiring policies’ ‘training and development goals’, etc.
Find out more
Get in touch to see how you can leverage cutting edge biology to boost your ESG performance in these areas and others.
People Recruitment, Training and Development to support EDI
Sustainability Goals
Governance
Contact adam@turingmeta.org.