If you’ve been here for awhile, you’ll know that here at SustainLab we mention the term ‘accelerate change’ a lot: it’s in our blog posts, our LinkedIn posts, our newsletters, and most significantly, it’s part of our company vision, "To accelerate change for Better Business – Better Planet".

But what does accelerating change really mean? What acceleration? How? And what is the change that needs to be accelerated? Well, we thought it was about time to get into it: what do we really mean when we talk about ‘accelerating change’ here at SustainLab?

What is ‘accelerating change’?

In general, there’s two ways of looking at what ‘accelerating change’ means. One refers to the description of change or a development that is occurring at an accelerating rate, while the other refers to an act of deliberately creating more positive change at an accelerating rate.

The former is more commonly used in relation to the discussion of technological change throughout history, where technological changes were, and still are, occurring at an increasing rate. Hence we can say that throughout history, we have experienced accelerating change.

The latter is more commonly used today, as a call to action, or a guiding principle, to spur on and inspire people to take action to make impactful change. In August 2020, United States Air Force Chief of Staff General Charles Q. Brown published a set of Action Orders for the Air Force, centered around the idea of "Accelerate Change or Lose". This was Brown’s strategic approach towards enabling change within the Air Force. He explained that keeping a forward-looking mindset, a key aspect of Air Force culture, requires being able to challenge the status quo and to make the necessary changes in order for the Air Force to be ‘ready for tomorrow’.

In 2019, the European Environment Agency released their report ‘Sustainability transitions: policy and practice’ together with the tagline, ‘How to accelerate change towards sustainability?’. The report focused on the goal of an accelerated sustainability transition within Europe, and set out 10 sets of messages for policy, each outlining how governments and other key stakeholders can enable systemic change towards long-term sustainability goals.

Something in common that both General Brown of the U.S Air Force’s and the EEA’s visions of ‘accelerating change’ have? The call for decisive, systemic change and long-term goals. Hey! That sounds a bit like what we believe too, here at SustainLab.

What do we mean when we say ‘accelerate change’ at SustainLab?

The idea of ‘accelerating change’ plays a very important role for SustainLab up till today and going forward, but it was particularly important in its humble beginnings. Before the SustainLab solution even came to be what it is today, its creation was guided by the philosophy of accelerating change – SustainLab, whatever it was going to be, should help accelerate change, especially in terms of a green transition and a journey towards a more sustainable society. Afterall, our slogan is ‘better business – better planet’.

When our co-founder Maria left her previous job as a sustainability manager at a multinational corporation, she reflected upon her experiences and realized that there were a lot of blockers standing in her way of creating change within her organization. These blockers were of different natures: organizational, cultural, technical, and included things like lack of data, inefficiency of existing business processes and rigid organizational structures and bureaucracy.

Maybe it was the fact that data was difficult to handle, resulting in tedious and time-consuming sustainability reporting, or that not everyone at her office wanted to work with sustainability, or that not everyone thought it was important or really cared, or that they felt it was a waste of budget – whatever it was, it was clear that it was difficult to make significant change with the current state of affairs.

And there it was: an idea for a solution. A solution that would accelerate and encourage impactful change by unblocking whatever was in the way of change, a solution that would be scalable and have a broader reach, create change at multiple companies at once, rather than one at a time. And what was the key ingredient to the solution? Data.

The creation of SustainLab was exactly inspired by the need to accelerate change. It was guided by the questions: what blockers can we help businesses unblock? And how? What are the different ways of unblocking, and increasing the pace of change that can be made? What will help companies achieve the most effect in the shortest time?

Central to the product development was the goal of helping companies accelerate change and to create impact, and making sure that fundamentally, the thought of accelerating change and creating impact would be included in every business process.

So how does SustainLab help companies accelerate change?

At the core of it, the SustainLab solution helps companies accelerate change by allowing them to save time on data-handling and administrative burden, so that more time can be put into taking impactful action. And how do we make that happen? With automation: the SustainLab solution helps companies automate their sustainability management. More specifically, it automates the collection, processing and visualization of sustainability data. Less time spent on data-handling means more time to take insightful action!

And how would companies know what sort of action to take? SustainLab provides companies with the know-how to make change: with a built-in recommendation system, we help companies understand what they should be working with when it comes to sustainability, in order for them to make the most impact. Regardless of where you are exactly on your sustainability journey, whether you’re just starting out or you want to take your sustainability agenda to the next level by changing your business model, SustainLab helps make it efficient for you to make an impact.

In fact, how we measure our business success is significantly based on the change we are able to create with our customers! One of the things we use to measure our success is the scope of sustainability our customers are measuring. We are always thinking of new and quicker ways of helping our customers understand more, and how we can help them be more efficient.

With increased quality and frequency of sustainability insights, the SustainLab solution also provides companies with rich and quick insight into their sustainability data as often as any other business critical data, which allows them to easily factor sustainability into everyday business decisions across different levels within the organization – from board meetings, to management meetings, to weekly team meetings, take your sustainability data with you and weigh-in with your high-value instant insights! If Sandra from the sales team wants to talk about how the next sales campaign will influence the company’s top-line, she will also know how it influences the company's target to shift their portfolio into a more sustainable one.

The data and insights you draw about your company and its impact using the SustainLab solution can also be leveraged to strengthen the brand value in marketing and sales communication! Get your CEO to use the data in investor relations work, use it to find new ways to meet your customers’ demands, and most of all - use it to get the full team on board to actually create change!

To learn more about how our platform can help you understand your sustainability impact a lot better and accelerate change within your organization, contact us or book a free demo with us!

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