Skoll Centre launches new playbook on putting systems thinking into practice

Leading with Sustainability

Aimed at C-suite leaders, managers and directors, and leaders across the non-profit and public sectors, the playbook has been developed with EY global Climate Change and Sustainability Services (CCaSS) practice. It distils insights from the inaugural year of the Learning Lab, which explores how sustainability leaders overcome the challenges of putting systems thinking into practice.

It responds to a challenge the Learning Lab surfaced repeatedly. Most leaders already accept that climate disruption, resource scarcity, social inequality and geopolitical volatility are interconnected forces creating material value risk. What remains difficult is acting on that insight inside organisations built to deliver predictable, repeatable outcomes.

The playbook sets out three strategies for closing that gap: embracing complexity without getting paralysed, creating space for a broader range of expertise, and building the structures that make boundary spanning, exploration and reflection possible.  

Each strategy comes with implementation tactics and case evidence from Interface, Ørsted, Octopus Energy, Tony's Chocolonely, Triodos, Seventh Generation, Toyota and UNDP. Ørsted identified project financing as its intervention point and went on to achieve a 98% reduction in Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2025. Interface, which treated sustainability as the anchor of its business model rather than a cost to manage, cut emissions by 96% and increased sales by 63%.

The playbook is co-authored by Professor Marya Besharov with Dr Abrar Chaudhury, Dr Jimmy Jia and Hannah Sassi of the Skoll Centre.

"Most organisations do not have a systems thinking problem, they have an organisational design problem” said Marya Besharov, Academic Director of the Skoll Centre and Professor in Organisations and Impact at Saïd Business School. “Leaders can see interconnected, long-term risks but struggle to act on them because incentives, reporting lines and quarterly horizons pull them back towards business as usual. This playbook details three practical moves for shifting from seeing to acting: where to intervene first, who needs to be in the room, and what has to change in governance and measurement for the work to hold." 

The playbook closes with a readiness checklist leaders can use to assess whether the conditions for putting systems thinking into practice are in place in their own organisation.

Leading with Sustainability is free to download.