Another Meeting #1
Live reporting from today's Meeting #1 on the UN SDGs journey
I was excited last week to be able to report almost live from one of our UN SDG onboarding meetings. It had just happened, it was fresh, and there was much to process.
Just done another one, this morning. It went pretty much the same way as last week’s, and I’d like to share my thoughts again on the process.
Again, it was a 30-minute meeting. This time, the client was an established company which had moved with $5M VC investment into EVs, rather than a listed company. (These dynamics make a big difference). As with last week’s client, they too, readily and quickly, appointed their UN SDG Designated Person. They had appetite to progress and were keen to explore next steps.
(You may remember that getting our clients to appoint a person with a role such as “UN SDG Designated Person” is something we cite as a “win” in our journey to progress 100 companies to do things they would not have done or to do things faster.)
Our agenda for this Meeting #1 was the same as always:
Where is the company now in its UN SDGs journey?
How far does the company want to go in its UN SDG journey
Let’s agree our first UN SDG focus area.
The answers to the first two questions were brief (as expected) and honest (as hoped):
We had not really made a start so far
We would like to be a role model
As we walked through the third question, agreeing the first UN SDG focus, the discussion became very lively as each person on the client side could see the importance of personal interests. This time, “Education” seemed to resonate, and we spent some time on the meaning of “ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all”.
I don’t know why it resonated. But it did. And that part is noteworthy.
At the meeting end, I then sent them these meeting minutes:
Client would start considering UN SDG Goals 3, 7 and 11
We would also embed goals 5, 10 and 12 as “obvious” sub-goals
At our next meeting, we would discuss industry best practices in those chosen areas
In the next meeting, we would also try to identify the first steps which the client could take on its UN SDG journey
As before, the meeting was simple and unchallenging. It was nevertheless productive and so the participants knew they had achieved something. There was a plan and there were next steps with which the review the plan, there was execution, and there was governance (we had agreed the UN SDG Designated Person before the meeting).
I’d like to return to the rationale of this approach - while I’m getting good feedback on these meetings, I know they are not following the best practice UN guidelines (e.g. starting with stakeholder survey and aligning goals with business purpose etc). I’m very eager to hear your contributions and comment on this - we may be doing something very wrong here and I’m ever-ready to adapt to become better at this.
So, the rationale is that a company with no prior UN SDG internal capability now had an Action Plan and Governance framework. The ball was rolling and there was enthusiasm. We had made decisions. We had done something.
We had also set expectations. I made it abundantly clear, that will produce a report in due course - a public document showing activities, outcomes, impacts, for better or worse. This report would be controversial, it would be expensive, and it would be challenging. At the earliest, it was a year away, at the latest two years. In fact, producing the SDG report had actually become a “goal” in and of itself, one which would trigger all the activities (initiatives, outcomes, impacts) which would start to make a tangible difference to life on this planet.
I did not over-egg the hard slog ahead. I know it will take much stronger governance, material budget commitment, board-level engagement and top-to-bottom alignment within the company, its sales-distribution and customer ecosystem and its supply chain. And I know full well that the 30-minute meetings will not be enough - they will turn into 1-hour multi-party monthlies, then include workshops, then include C-suite and other members of the company with assigned workstream and project definitions.
And you can be sure that we will move all that as fast as we can. We will build process which is full-and-complete as Prof Cathy Clark at Duke University and the UN SDG Team could hope.
In your view, are we doing OK to progress in this way? Are we short-circuiting the formal approach in a way which is harmful to longer-term outcomes? Are we trivialising the whole thing?